Maybe you noticed that we did not release new version currently but just repacked installation with some urgent fixes. Actually we are still focusing more attentions on our core dnn blog product - SunBlogNuke. Yep, we are building totally version 5.0 as we promised ever. In the v5.x, we will enhance more awesome features, specially theme, widget & extension. Meanwhile we also refactored the core framework more highlight, integrity & flexibility. Always we hope that it will be the kind of beautiful, elegant and productive software.

The initial version 5.0 will include some new cool UI for admin panel, such as dashboard & new workaround for theme configure process. Please stay tune and it will be available to download. :).  Well. have a quick look at the screenshot about new theme configure panel and you can try it out in our demo blog, which have been upgraded with v5.0:

And we are looking forwards to your feedback. We know that the more feedback we get from our clients, the better our product will be and also we will know which areas require attentions next. So please tell us what you want most or leave your comment below if you are interested in Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke. Thanks a lot.

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+.

As Facebook is the leading global social networking website, you are able to increase your web presence by leveraging the power of the social graph. Today we released a new extension called 'OpenGraph', which allows you easily integrate Ultimate DNN Blog Module - SunBlogNuke and the Facebook’s open social graph.  If you are familiar with our blogging product, you may ever apply the way mentioned in the older tutorial - Facebook Like Button Making Your DNN Blog more Attractive. From v4.7, the 'OpenGraph' extension will be better choice for this extended requirement.

The main code as follows:

/// 

/// Add the Facebook social meta tags to your blog.
/// 
/// the current page
/// the current blog post
private void AddOpenGraphMetaTags(CDefault basePage, EntryInfo entity)
{
    basePage.HtmlAttributes.Add("xmlns:og", "http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/");
    basePage.HtmlAttributes.Add("xmlns:fb", "http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml");

    PortalSettings settings = basePage.PortalSettings;
    if (settings == null) settings = HttpContext.Current.Items["PortalSettings"] as PortalSettings;

    HttpRequest request = HttpContext.Current.Request;
    string PortalBasicUrl = Globals.GetPortalDomainName(settings.PortalAlias.HTTPAlias, request, true);
    string logoImg = string.Format("{0}/Portals/{1}/{2}", PortalBasicUrl, settings.PortalId, settings.LogoFile);
    AddMetaTag(basePage, "og:title", entity.Title);
    AddMetaTag(basePage, "og:type", "Blog");
    //AddMetaTag(basePage, "og:image", settings.HomeDirectory + settings.LogoFile);
    AddMetaTag(basePage, "og:image", HtmlTextUtils.GetFirstImageSrc(HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(entity.Entry), logoImg));
    AddMetaTag(basePage, "og:url", entity.Permalink);
    AddMetaTag(basePage, "og:site_name", settings.PortalName);
    AddMetaTag(basePage, "og:description", HtmlTextUtils.FormatDescrption(entity.Description, entity.Entry, 255));
    AddMetaTag(basePage, "og:email", settings.Email);
}

private void AddMetaTag(CDefault basePage, string name, string content)
{
    string tagToken = string.Format("", name, content);
    LiteralControl litLinks = new LiteralControl(tagToken);

    basePage.Header.Controls.Add(litLinks);
}

You may notice that here we apply the image meta tag with the first image found in the post. If not exist, use the portal logo. If you are developer, feel free to modify it with other customized logic.

To apply the blog extension, it is so easy and just follow up the simple steps below:

1) Download it from the extensions directory.
2) Unzip it and upload the extension file 'OpenGraph.cs' into the folder $ROOT/bin/Blog_Extensions. If not exist please create it at first.
3) Open up the web.config and add the directory 'Blog_Extensions' in the element [codeSubDirectories] as follow:

<codeSubDirectories>
  <add directoryName="HTML" />
      <add directoryName="Blog_Extensions" />
codeSubDirectories>

That is all. It should work like a charm - when visiting the post detail, it will automatically add the Facebook social meta tags to your blog post.

Please visit our showcase gallery to see how it action with integrated with social bookmarking. Take a look at the screenshot:

Για να δουμε πως πα?ζει Ελληνικ?

xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <property name="Skin">Defaultproperty>
  <property name="AutoResizeHeight">Trueproperty>
  <property name="ContentFilters">RemoveScripts,EncodeScripts,FixUlBoldItalic,FixEnclosingP,IECleanAnchors,MozEmStrong,
  ConvertFontToSpan,OptimizeSpans,ConvertToXhtml,IndentHTMLContentproperty>
  ....
configuration>

Hope it helps for somebody who encountered the same issue. :) Thanks again for Rumen and the Telerik team.

Refer to the original post mentioned the issue originally: RadEditor converting Greek characters to their html entities!

The customizable image viewing widget is based on popular and awesome component – SimpleViewer. Initially the widget was inspired by our showcase gallery and we would like to provide the alternative way to present  those excellent websites with their thumbnails. Then we made some searches in Google and finally got that SimpleViewer is what we want. It is so lightweight and easy to use, it features smart preloading, a resizable interface, thumbnail menu and optional description text. The only thing is that we need to load gallery xml data from our showcase gallery. That should be so easy. Then I took 2 hours to program it with retrieving all the target posts with their thumbnails and provide some basic options for customizing the personation of flash component . All look great. Please visit the page to see how it actions.

Note that its minimal required environment is DNN v5.x and SunBlogNuke v4.2.5 and  it is not core widget so we may not support  all the possible issues. You can extend it as you want due to the available source code, such as category select support. Also feel free to leave your thoughts and suggestions here if you indeed would like to let us make it more awesome and we may enhance it for you. In the latest version we will integrated it with Flickr Gallery. That will be more awesome.

BTW, we will release fixed version - SunBlogNuke v4.2.5 with some urgent fixes. Please stay tune. :) Now it is available here - Fixed Version 4.2.5 for SunBlogNuke.

<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.

Also you may have a look at the release note about SunBlogNuke v3.8.2:

• ENH - Added new token [BIO] in the entity Author.
• ENH - Integrated with Active Social Journals.
• ENH - Provided more handy parameters in Rss Feed, including "item"(Limiting items number) and "excerpt"(Whether including excerpt when activating "Full Show in Rss Feed").
• FIX - Avatar broken when integrated with dnn core profile.
• FIX - Rss Feed ignore "items max" option and always returning all posts.
• Other small fixes & customizations.

As usual, the complete details for all of the changes can be found in the Release Notes.

Enjoy Blogging and Writing. :)

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. :)

Like other guideline, let us go through the following steps to make it run in your dnn portal:

1. Add the Content Slider Widget module to your target page like landing or home page.
2. Open Widget settings
3. Complete some basic options
4. That is the important step here. You may need to configure [Item Template] as follows:

   <div id="postItem_[POSTID]" class="post">
       <h3 class="title"><a href="[TARGET]" title="PermaLink for [TITLE]" rel="bookmark">[TITLE]a>h3>
       <h5 class="byline">[ADDEDDATE|MMM]<br>[ADDEDDATE|dd]h5>
       <h5 class="tags">Tagged as: [TAG]h5>
       <h6 class="comments">
          <a href="[TARGET]#comments" title="Comment on [TITLE]">[COMMENTCOUNT]a>
       h6>
       <p>[EXCERPTTEXT]p>
   div>

5. Click “Update”
6. Now those posts with related data may exist there but not styled well, let’s attach some magic CSS for making it look more attractive. Copy the following styles into your skin style file, like skin.css, or other similar place:

   /* Recent Posts Style */
   .sliderWidget .post{padding-left:3em;position:relative;border-bottom:1px solid #EEEEEE;margin-bottom:1em;}
   .sliderWidget h3.title{font-style:italic;font-weight:normal;margin-right:1.6em;}
   .sliderWidget h3.title a:link, .sliderWidget h3.title a:visited{color:#555;text-decoration:none;font-size:1.3em;}
   .sliderWidget h3.title a:hover{text-decoration:underline;color:#000;}
   .sliderWidget h5.tags{font-weight:normal;}
   .sliderWidget h5.byline{color:#777777;left:0;margin:5px;position:absolute;top:0;width:2.5em;text-align:center;}
   .sliderWidget h6.comments{background-color:#464646;height:25px;position:absolute;right:0;text-align:center;top:0;width:25px;}
   .sliderWidget h6.comments a{color:#FFF;display:block;padding:4px 0;text-decoration:none;}
   .sliderWidget h6.comments:hover{background-color:#D44314;}

Well done, that is all. Congratulations, your widget will work like a charm. Enjoy blogging & writing.

If you have any feedback or question, please feel free to post a comment below or send us a note. Thanks a lot.