Currently we are focusing on our totally new module - GalleryPlus and hope that it will be the last photo gallery & slider module with DotNetNuke platform you would like to owe. With GalleryPlus, you can manage your albums & photos; plus feel free to build your own customized interface by lots of external resources without any complicated code, such as any jQuery gallery & slider plugin you can find. Some initial awesome features as follows:

• Multiple & sortable albums.
• Ability to upload multiple images and a zip package with images.
• Automatic thumbnail generation.
• Dynamic image sizing when uploading images - Images can be scaled automatically and set to a maximum scale to ensure that there’s no loss of quality.
• Highly customizable with lots of popular image effect : Fancybox, Lightbox or PrettyPhoto.
• Simply drag to sort images with lots of options, such as uploaded date, title, modified date etc.
• (Optional) automatically image preloaded to minimize loading time.

Today here we would like to showcase one cool sample with core plugins - Slicebox. Slicebox makes use of the 3D transforms properties and allows different kind of effects. The main idea is to create three-dimensional image slices that will rotate and reveal the next image as another side of the 3d object.

Please note that you can only see the cool 3d effect of Slicebox in a browser that supports those CSS3 properties (currently Chrome and Safari). In case the browser does not support 3D transformations, a simple slider will be used as fallback.Take a look at how it action:

SliceBox Demo »

If you are interested in this ultra dnn module - GalleryPlus, please leave your comments with any thoughts below or just stay tune - it will be available soon. :)

UPDATE: GalleryPlus is available for you so please feel free to owe it from Snowcovered.com - Ultra DNN Gallery Module - GalleryPlus.

Out of the box, you just need to specify the public twitter account info (username) and this dnn widget will do the rest for you. Moreover, you can control how tweets are displayed from widget settings panel, such as Number of displayed Tweets & whether to Show Replies. The cache mechanism also let your dnn website avoid critical website load traffic. Have a look at the screenshots below:

Tweets list with different dnn container styles:

Widget settings panel for configuration:

Note: this module relies on twitter's public profile API and it can only list the tweets of public account. It is unavailable for private accounts.

Next we will enhance it with template-driven mode and include the extendibility to be completely customized with lots of different look & feel based your expectations.

If you have any good advice about our products, please feel free to leave a comment or contact us via email. :)

Download it from Snowcovered »

As you know, our dnn blogging module – SunBlogNuke supports the remote 3rd-party publishing tool, in other words, you can use a third-party Desktop/Mobile application for your dnn blog which we call it “Remote Posting”. Microsoft Office 2010 is one of remote Posting app with just a few simple steps. It indeed makes publishing a blog post so easy that you might just be in total amazement. Please refer to the tutorial for more instruction - How To Create and Publish Blog Posts in Word 2010 & 2007. And some following notes you should know:

1) Connecting SunBlogNuke with Microsoft Office 2010/2007, you need to fill in the "Blog Post Url" with the link "http://www.domain.com/DesktopModules/SunBlog/MetaWeblog.ashx". Just replace "domain" with your real domain name.
2) Unfortunately, Microsoft Word still doesn’t let you add things like tags, custom fields, SEO options, etc; so it is probably a good idea to choose the Publish As Draft option so that you can add those things and then publish from your blog.

In the end, we would like to let you know that actually we prefer to use Window Live Writer as remote publishing tool and it supplies more flexible features :)

Disqus Comments System

Disqus is a comments platform that helps easily you build a networked community for your website. And Comments+ integrated with Disqus comment system seamlessly and included all the benefits from Disqus service - http://disqus.com/features/, such as Threaded comments, Blacklists and whitelists, Notification, Inline media embedding…. LOTs of features. Before going any further, you will need to register your website with Disqus. You will also need to create a user profile in order to login and administer this website. During registration, you will pick a shortname for your Comments+ module, which is how Disqus identifies your website community in the system. Then in order to active Disqus comments, just go through the simple process below:

1) Head over to Disqus.com to login with your account.

2) (Optional) Visit the Application section - http://disqus.com/api/applications/ and register your new application for calling APIs. It will be mentioned in detail later steps.

3) Login with host account of your dnn website and add a new CommentsPlus module into your destination page.

4) Enter the configure panel with the left-top action menu of current comments+ module.

5) Complete the settings with checking the option [Comment type] as "Disqus". Actually those options are so self-explained and easily configured. See the screenshots as follows and some notes below:

Note that:

• Application public Key: it is "Public Key" generated by the application in the steps 2) and just required when you will not use the "University way".
• Identifier key: It is part of the thread identifier key and will append to the "Identifier prefix" in the Disqus thread. In common letting it blank is all right. Meanwhile, it is more useful to integrate Comments+ with other 3rd party modules, for example, when integrating dnn core blog module you can fill in the query parameter "entryid" as the Identifier key, it will check out the query parameter in the load process. If not exist, the comment system will not show. So just visiting the post detail, the comments+ will work as expected.

6) Click "Update" to save the settings.

Congratulations. Now the Disqus comments system will work like a charm. :)

Facebook Comments System

To be completed. Please stay tune.

Key Features

What sets Comments+ apart from other DNN comments modules?

• Easy to install & set up.
• Integrated with Disqus comment system seamlessly so it included all the benefits from Disqus service - http://disqus.com/features/, such as Threaded comments, Blacklists and whitelists, Notification, Inline media embedding…. LOTs of features.
• Comments become more like live discussions with real-time posting and updating with offering a faster, more intuitive experience.
• Full integration with Facebook, Twitter, and more. Let people login, comment, and share using social services they already use and love.
• Provided universal way (a generic JavaScript snippet that can be implemented anywhere but the drawback is SEO missing) & API call with SEO-friendly.
• Multiple instances with unlimited pages/tabs.
• As the awesome widget module for Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke.
• Flexible option to integrated with any 3rd party module, like Html/Text module, NA (Ventrian News Articles) & DigArticle.
• Integrated with Active Social Journal seamlessly. (Just supported Disqus comments now)
• Alternative Facebook comments system.

Road map

1. Generic comment system for DotNetNuke platform
2. Sync comments in the background so that it will populate them in the local quickly
3. More & more

How it Action

Buzz with CommentsPlus Module

Buzz with Facebook Comments+

Buzz in Social DNN - dnnwave.com

With comments+, it has great potential to add a much higher level of interaction with your website visitors and yourself, as well as being able to aggregate all of your visitors activity in one spot, not to mention your own. One killing feature is that all comments is SEO-friendly and are able to be indexed by Search Engine quickly.

BTW, as you noticed, it was implemented as one widget module for our core product - Ultimate DNN Blog Module SunBlogNuke.  So if you are our clients of SunBlogNuke, including Professional license & Enterprise license, comments+ is free to access in the extension page of our website. If you are not now please feel free to join our community and will be surprised. :)

Updated:

Matt’s Review

I've used Comments+ with Disqus throughout autechheads.com, and it's fantastic - virtually seamless. I've switched off the comments provided with other modules because this does such a good job.

The SEO functionality is great, and the Active Social integration is a real winner. Unified comments throughout the site is great for a lot of reasons, and this one is definitely worth it. The implementation makes it easy to add comment counts using the Disqus javascript snippets.

I'm already a fan of SunBlogNuke and this is yet another great module that I'm thrilled with! :-)

Thanks a lot for Matt's review. If you are interested in this awesome module, please order it with the Snowcovered link - Ultra Comments+.

It's a very easy way for people to share articles they like and also helps drive more traffic to your sites. Since it seems most people have Facebook accounts now-a-days, there should be plenty of users on blogs liking things. Best part is, it's really easy to add to your blog too. Let us go through some steps below to add Facebook like button into your dnn blog:

1. Make sure you have installed our blogging module – SunBlogNuke and build your own blog in some specific page.
2. Go to the admin panel of your blog and click "Customize" link into Customize Panel.
3. Switch "Widget" tab and choose "Footer in Post Detail" type for your template like that:

   

4. Copy the following code into the template box:

   <iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=[PERMALINK]&layout=standard&show_faces=true&width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light"
       scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" style="border: none;overflow: hidden; width: 530px; height: 60px">
   iframe>

5. Click "Update".

That is all. Please visit here to see how it action - The Latest in Blogging Innovation.You can change the parameters to customize the link button however you want. I think this is an awesome little trick and will drive more traffic than any of those "share" buttons on most blogs.

The tutorial is converted with the forum post - Adding a "Facebook Like" button. Thanks for Matt’s contributions again.

Updated: integrating with Facebook OpenGraph meta tags helps to populate the Facebook link/page/item fields in the Facebook Profile. Just follow up the steps below:

1. Open up the view file "DetailView.ascx" of your current theme, which you have better make it as the customized theme.
2. Import the namespace in the top like that (the second line is what you need to append):

   <%@ Control Language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" EnableViewState="false"  Inherits="SunBlogNuke.UI.PostViewBase" %>
   <%@ Import Namespace="SunBlogNuke.Common" %>

3. Append the code in the end and save it (Note that you need to replace 'YOUR FACEBOOK ID'.):

   <script language="vbscript" runat="server">
       Sub Page_PreRender(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
           DirectCast(Page, PageBase).HtmlAttributes.Add("xmlns:og", "http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/")
           DirectCast(Page, PageBase).HtmlAttributes.Add("xmlns:fb", "http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml")
       
           Page.Header.Controls.Add(New LiteralControl("& Entry.Title & """/>"))
           Page.Header.Controls.Add(New LiteralControl(""))
           Page.Header.Controls.Add(New LiteralControl("& ModuleContext.PortalSettings.HomeDirectory & ModuleContext.PortalSettings.LogoFile & """/>"))
           Page.Header.Controls.Add(New LiteralControl("& Entry.Link & """/>"))
           Page.Header.Controls.Add(New LiteralControl("& ModuleContext.PortalSettings.PortalName & """/>"))
           Page.Header.Controls.Add(New LiteralControl(""))
           Page.Header.Controls.Add(New LiteralControl("& HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(HtmlTextUtils.StripHtml(Entry.Description)) & """/>"))
       End Sub
   script>

<dnn:NAV runat="server" id="dnnNAV" CSSControl="mainMenu" IndicateChildren="false" ProviderName="DNNMenuNavigationProvider">
    <CustomAttributes>
        <dnn:customattribute value="UnorderedList" name="RenderMode" />
    CustomAttributes>
dnn:NAV>

Note that it adds "CustomAttributes" to the NAV tag and you also make sure to add the declaration below to your skin, otherwise the CustomAttribute tags cause an error, which prevent the skin from loading.

<%@ Register TagPrefix="dnn" Namespace="DotNetNuke.UI.Skins" Assembly="DotNetNuke" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="dnn" TagName="NAV" Src="~/Admin/Skins/Nav.ascx" %>

You now can style the menu how you like to using the css classes below:

Class	Description	Sample	Explanation
.m	All Sub Menu	.m	All sub menus
.m[level]	Sub Menu at Level x	.m0	First level sub menus
.mid[id]	Sub Menu with ID x	.mid39	DNN Admin Sub Menu
.break	Break	.break	All menu breaks
.mi	Menu Item (all)	.mi	All Menu Items
.id	Menu Item with ID x	.id41	Menu Item with ID 41
.mi[path]	Menu Item in Specific Path	.mi0 .mi1-0	First Menu Item (Home) First child of second root menu
.root	Root Menu Item	.root	All root menu items
.first	First Menu Item	.first .root.first	First menu item in each menu First menu item in root only
.last	Last Menu Item	.last .first.last	Last menu item in each menu Menu items with only one item (both 1st and last)
.icn	Icon	.first.icn	First Icon container in all menus
.hov	Hover	.root.first.hov	First menu item hover
.sel	Selected	.m .sel	Selected sub menu items
.bc	BreadCrumb	.m .bc	Breadcrum sub menu items
.txt	Text (Coming Soon!)	.m .txt	Text portion of all sub menu items Not Implemented Yet
*	All child elements	.m .mi *	All elements within menu item

Also we updated the Testimonials page and build an awesome testimonials slider widget in the home page by following the tutorial - Turn Content Slider Widget into a jQuery Carousel. More we modify lightly our team blog page with an attractive dnn container in the sidebar. Hope that our clients can enjoy those enhancements.

Another good news is that our Ultimate Blogging Module - SunBlogNuke also have been fully tested with DotNetNuke 5.5.  We are not aware of any issues at this time and it just work as we expected. Later we will release a new building v3.7.5  with fixing some more bugs and issue. Hope it makes sense for you.

Enjoy Blogging and Writing. :)

NOTE: Although I don't want to cover it about how to implement it in great detail here, you can refer to the guideline for details.

Overview

This awesome utility provides the sitemap for the Ultimate DNN Blogging Module - SunBlogNuke.

Requirement

Make sure that our blog module - SunBlogNuke have been running in your website before installing this provider.

Compatibility

compatible with DNN Versions 5.3+

How to apply it in your dnn website?

Now let us go through the awesome applying process with some simple steps as follows:

1. Get the PA from our download page
2. Install it like any extension in your dnn website
3. Simple go to the Admin –> Search Engine SiteMap tab for a portal that contains your module populated with content (locally) and clear the cache for the sitemap module (you may need to completely clear the site cache). You should be able to see the SunBlogNuke Sitemap Provider located in the data grid within the module as screenshot below:

   

4. Click the Sitemap URL link (also located in the module) to validate our blogging module is exposing your posts to the sitemap.
5. Next you feel free to submit the update sitemap to any Search Engine like Google or Bing.

Well, that is all. Hopefully you can start taking advantage of this handy provider to enhance SEO and bring lots of traffic for your website.

• Supported two new category widget & tagcloud widget, which you can add into any page at any time and point it to any blog on the portal.
• Full support for dnn core token replace functionality.
• Enhanced content slider widget with supporting category and tag tokens.
• Supported slug for category and enhanced FormatSEOFriendlyURL method .
• Added tag mouseover/hover color option to control tagcumulus flash.
• Fixed issue where critical error something not set to an instance of the object after upgrade.
• Other small fixes & more customizations.

As with any release, we recommend you perform a complete file and database backup before performing any upgrade on a production website and that you first conduct a trial upgrade on a staging version of the site. Following these guidelines will ensure that you are able to recover should any unforeseen problems arise during the upgrade process.

You can get it here. Enjoy blogging and good writing! :)

The SunBlogNuke Team