By Bo Nørgaard on Thursday, August 07, 2008

I changed the layout of the divs, from fixed/relative to absolute. The skin was build with the header, menu and footer area as fixed areas, and the content area as relative. This setup uses the vertical scrollbar at the full height of the browser, which was part of the design fault that led me to remove the footer. Another issue with this setup was that I had to ensure that content was not hidden under the header and footer area.

I changed all areas (divs) to absolute positioning and reintroduced the footer again, as I really didn't like having the copyright and legal parts in the header. This also moved the vertical scrollbar into the content div, which both looks and feels right. The footer was reduced in size from two lines to one line, because I will keep the breadcrumbs in the header area.

Right now I believe that the skin is done, but let's see what I think next month :-)

By Bo Nørgaard on Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Removing the footer from the skin has another impact in IE, the content area is getting wider, so IE shows a horizontal scrollbar -  non of the other browsers do that. My admin screens are using the old layout, and here everything looks fine in IE.

I guess that its time to look at the general layout, as I don't need all these floating div's when there are no footer area. I really dislike all the things you need to do to make a border layout with xhtml and css, with frames or table designs it could be done in minutes - not weeks.

By Bo Nørgaard on Tuesday, August 05, 2008

After looking at the skin for the last month, I found that the content area looked to framed by the colored borders.

When the content was too large for the content area, it was hidden by the footer - this looked more like an error than designed on purpose.

So moved the content from the footer to the header, and removed the footer.

Then I had a long argument with IE about font sizes... FireFox and Safari on both my Windows and iMac (yes I have an apple mac with a nice 24" screen) was showing all my changes, where IE ignored me. Finally I managed to get all the font sizes to look, almost but not entirely unlike each other.

I am so happy that it is not my design skills that pay the bills.

By Bo Nørgaard on Monday, August 04, 2008

Now the vacation is over, and I have started working again. I did believe that I could find the time to do DotNetNuke development in the evenings, but I have been so busy in the vacation, that it’s nice to get back to work and relax a bit ;-)

So what did I do in the last part of the vacation? Well actually a lot of work on our house. I removed the floor from two rooms and two bathrooms. I also took down the wall between the two bathrooms as we are moving a square meter from the large one to the small one, which provides us with two good bathrooms. I installed new water drains and pipes, including a new pipe for heating the new floor, and the last part was to create a new concrete floor. Next in line is creating the new wall.

Tonight I will try to look into all the different projects that I had open, and prioritize these so I can close as many as possible this week.

4 weeks with minimal keyboard activity made me eager to get started again, and with the coming version 5 of DotNetNuke I believe that it’s going to be an exiting fall this year.

By Bo Nørgaard on Wednesday, July 09, 2008

The Multi Page module installation is still not working, the module is not registered as having implemented the ISearchable interface. It is working on the development instance, and I beleive that I have registred the module correctly in the DNN file.

I think that I have tried all that I can think of, so now there are only one thing to do, debugging. I will now download the source version of DotNetNuke, compile and start it in Visual Studio debug mode, set the breakpoints and then install my module and see whats happening.

Some still ask why I don't use the source version of the core application, but why should I, the starterkit is easy to use and upgrade, and the install package includes all that I need for test and production sites.

By Bo Nørgaard on Tuesday, July 08, 2008

I am back from an action packed vacation; sorry that I couldn’t tell you before but there have been multiple thefts from homes here in Denmark, where people wrote in their blog or community page that they where going on vacation (and that the house was empty).

The vacation started in Le Mans (France) where we participated in the 24 hours roller skate race (www.24rollers.com). Our team called Rolling Vikings ended at place 349 of total 638, with 124 completed laps at the Bugatti circuit. Our kids, Casper and Laura did do the practice round, and are both very proud that they have been roller skating the Le Mans race track.

After Le Mans we did go to the Eiffel tower in Paris, then the Disneyland Park, and at last we where at a water world park relaxing, playing mini golf, ice skating, driving moon cars, and jumping trampolines etc.

12 days without a computer, I am eager to get started closing some of the tasks on the list and I will blog regularly again.

By Bo Nørgaard on Thursday, June 26, 2008

I am still working on the skin and modules, but due to other tasks that I need to do, I will not be able to blog regularly again until July 8. I hope to find time in between but I can't promise anything.

By Bo Nørgaard on Monday, June 23, 2008

Some have reported that the multi page content module is not providing any information to the DotNetNuke search engine, but I am sure that it is registered and is working.

I tested it a lot, used the debugger to look for anything that could go wrong, and even solved a link issue where data was on pages other than the first and the parameter was encoded to a friendly URL. But still I couldn't reproduce the reported error.

Then I installed a fresh DotNetNuke, and installed the binary version of the module - and now the reported error was true, no page content could be found with the search engine. The only difference is that the source files have been compiled into a DLL.

In the module registration page, the compiled module has no checkmarks in Portable, Searchable, and Upgradeable; in the source version the checkmarks are fine.

My first idea was that the code must have been optimized away, as I have placed all the code in a separate class which is not use by the module, only the DotNetNuke framework. So I moved all the code to the Controller class, which is used by the module and therefore cannot be optimized away, - but still no luck, the error is still there.

My next idea was that it was an issue with the site running in medium trust, so I tried in the local installation - and the error was still there, so it's not a trust issue.

It's late and I will continue tomorrow.

By Bo Nørgaard on Friday, June 20, 2008

Today I finished up the source, published and packed the secondary navigation skin object. The best I can say about it right now is that it is working, probably also working as designed.

But I am not sure that this is the right menu type for this site, as it is not providing the overview that I was aiming for. Yes I have the path at the bottom of the page at all times, but I still thing that you get lost in the menus.

I will continue building the site, and examine how the menu is working when there are more pages and information available.

Next on the task list is to create the css styles for all the text content and links. Currently the fonts and sizes vary a lot on the few browsers that I have installed.

By Bo Nørgaard on Thursday, June 19, 2008

Okey I didn't think that the old modules had any interest anymore, but I was wrong. After many requests I have uploaded some of the old modules, including the source code and Visual Studio projects.

Please note that these are .Net 1.1 modules, and is not intended to be used in DotNetNuke 4 or above.

And yes, I will create new versions of these for DotNetNuke 4, and I plan to upgrade these so they all support the multi language function in DotNetNuke 5.