SunBlogNuke - DotNetNuke Blog Module

As we promised ever, we always maintain the independent branch of SunBlogNuke compatible well with older version of DNN  CMS, such as the DNN4-building.

Today we would like to announce that we have built another compatible package of SunBlogNuke for DNN5.2+.

Even through you are still using the DotNetNuke 5, you don’t have to be worry about it and just feel free to let it there without any update as you like. Surely, the development status is still active; we will include updates with fixes if necessary.

You can get it here. We hope that with this generation dnn blog module  you can enjoy the blog writing and it will make your life better; plus if you have any good advice about our products, please feel free to leave a comment or contact us.

Note:

1) If your dnn website is DNN5.2 above, you should ignore this package and get more latest package.

2) We may charge $25/hour for premium support of these compatible buildings or some additional feature requests.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BTW,  if you would like to upgrade it with latest package in your DNN5/DNN6/DNN7+ website, the recommended upgrade path will be changed as follows:

v2.x/v3.x/v4.x –> v5.2 –> v6.2 or the latest package

And if you are troubleshooting with upgrade, please take a look at these tutorials below:

Common problems with SunBlogNuke

Known issues related with upgrade

Recently we are building a totally new branch of #DNN #Blog #Module – SunBlogNuke based on DNN 7.1 core framework. As you know, DNN7 indeed introduced lots of awesome features, including advanced url rewrite solution. There are more topic about DNN7, however, we just share some interesting things about new class "ModuleSearchBase".

Today our team released a new optional widget (named 'Photo Viewer Widget') for Ultimate DNN Blog Module – #SunBlogNuke. If you are the client of our module and finding some similar stuffs, that is yours and feel free to get it from widget page (Required Login). It is free, customizable image gallery. It allows you to display the thumbnail of your blog posts on any dnn website in a professional and intuitive way.  Take a look at the screenshot below:

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 case-studies 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 make it look more awesome.

As our popular blogging module #SunBlogNuke applied in more and more websites, it may fit most user sceneries for clients but actually some awesome features also hidden in the background. Today we would like to share you 5 killer features you should be interested in. Let us get started the investigation now.

After integration SunBlogNuke with Window Live Writer, you may wonder where to find or what to replace the excerpt field in the built-in edit post panel. There is one elegant workaround – using the <!--more--> tag to mark the end of the excerpt. Fortunately, there is a setting property called "supportsExtendedEntries" in the wlwmanifest.xml depending on the feature. Please note that setting this value to true will allow the <!--more--> tag in your Window Live Writer. 

What you need to accomplish is placing your cursor where you want the “Read More” tag and selecting “Split Post” from the “Format” menu. Then the collection page and simple entry partial will be modified to have a "Read More" link whenever there is extended content. Have  a look at the screenshot as follows:

Also you can see the more features integrated with WLW, for example, keyword, category and slug etc. :)

Have you ever seen a blogger mention how important it is to schedule posts ahead? You know that there is a certain time in a day when each site gets its most amount of users or maybe you are going for a one week vacation, but you don’t want to abandon your blog. How do you fix these problems? Now it is generally a good idea to have a few posts scheduled ahead in case those things come up. If you are a SunBlogNuke user, you might not know that you have the ability to schedule posts ahead. It is actually quite easy! In addition to scheduling posts ahead, you can use old dates if you want your post to be dated sometime in the past.

Here is how to schedule your posts to be published at a different time and/or date:

1. Begin to write your post via edit post panel or WLW client tool.
2. Go to where it says PublishDate on the bottom of the Options section and adjust the time/date to reflect when you would like your post to be published. You will want to verify that your blog’s time is set up correctly to ensure the post appears when you want it to.
3. Click "Save & Publish" action button to publish the post.
4. The post will now appear in the Manage posts panel, but will not show on your site until the designated date/time. Yes, if you configure it into the past, it will post right away and show the designated date/time.

This is a useful way to keep a few posts saved for a rainy day or to keep content showing up if an illness puts you out of commission for a while. You can also experiment with posting times to see what works best for you and your readers. It is more important for SEO if there exists scheduled posts in your website. Google love website and blog with continuous post and updates. If you are posting more then 8 post a day and then for the next few days no post, You are actually hurting your website authority and page rank. With scheduling you can keep your blog running and your blog will never run out of the post. Maybe you should know the fact that Schedule your Posts for the Best Success.

Good luck and happy writing.

The SunBlogNuke team

Today we are glad to announce that SunBlogNuke v6.1 is available to free upgrade. It looks a long time without any updates from our team, however, don’t worry about this project and we are still paying lots of attentions on developing better software/products for you and it will be never dead :)

As more and more websites built by SunBlogNuke, our clients not only focused on the efficiency and better usability but also asked more requests about the performance of this publishing tool. Indeed it is time to speed up another performance action. We reviewed the performance of all the store procedures with SQL Server Profiler and invested where it was running slow and why. In the process, we built accurate iteration to fix them with running lots of testing. Even through we may missed something else,  there had been no sacrifice of quality and stability in the SunBlogNuke product and we assured you that the SunBlogNuke v6.1 will be speeded up in your DotNetNuke website.

Why not have a try? Get started now.

Major Highlights in v6.1:
Min DotNetNuke version required: v6.0.0

• ENH - SQL optimizations with better performance, mainly for default blog view and Content Slider Widget.
• ENH - supported new tokens "DigNum" and "BuryNum" for post entity.
• FIX - upgrade issue from "4.8.0" to "6.0" caused by SQL script.
• FIX - approved/rejected links always show when posting new comment.
• FIX - date time not referring to the preferred timezone of every current user any more.
• FIX - email notification not delivered when new comment posted.
• FIX - threw exception when aggregate feed based on portal level.

If you are applying upgrade process, please BACK UP YOUR CHANGES BEFORE PROCEEDING and follow up the suggested upgrade path: v2.1->v5.2->v6.0+.

NOTE: from v6.0 the SunBlogNuke will begin to not support DotNetNuke 5.x any more because it will utilize core APIs introduced from DNN6+, such as daylight savings time. If you are still using the dnn5, you don’t have to be worry about it because we will also maintain independent branch of the older version 5.8.x, which will always be compatible with dnn5 and may be updated with fixes without new features any more.

You can get it here. We hope that with this generation dnn blog module you can enjoy the blog writing and it will make your life better; plus if you have any good advice about our products, please feel free to leave a comment or contact us.

The SunBlogNuke Team

As we promised ever, we always maintain the independent branch of SunBlogNuke and build it compatible well with older version DNN4.x. Even through you are still using the DotNetNuke 4, you don’t have to be worry about it and just feel free to let it there without any update as you like. Yes, the development status is active, too; we may include some updates with fixes if necessary.

Today we would like to announce that we had updated the latest package of SunBlogNuke for DNN4 from v4.8 to v5.2, which is available for free upgrade.

In this version we had included lots of cool features introduced by the main building and fixed some urgent bugs introduced by the last building, including SQL script and installation manifest conflict with DNN4.

You can get it here. We hope that with this generation dnn blog module  you can enjoy the blog writing and it will make your life better; plus if you have any good advice about our products, please feel free to leave a comment or contact us.

BTW,  if you would like to upgrade it with latest package in your DNN5/DNN6/DNN7+ website, the recommended upgrade path will be changed as follows:

v2.x/v3.x/v4.x –> v5.2 –> v6.1 or the latest package

And if you are troubleshooting with upgrade, please take a look at these tutorials below:

Common problems with SunBlogNuke

Known issues related with upgrade

Finally the SunBlogNuke 6.0 is available to free upgrade today and it will be first version of next generation blog optimized for DNN6 & DNN7. In this building we fixed some critical issues, including daylight savings time issue with removing timezone option and Windows Azure Cloud Compatibility; plus implemented lots of enhancements, such as feature related posts with thumbnail and posts migration between blog instances in the same portal/website.

And next we will focus more attentions on mobile devices, including responsible theme and App to manage blog posts/comments. Now we are trying to find professional designer, if you are interested in our blogging/article module or familiar with DNN skin design, you can contact us and help us design better theme with HTML5.

Major Highlights in v6.0:
Min DotNetNuke version required: v6.0.0

• ENH - supported to feature related posts with thumbnails.
• ENH - implemented posts migration between blog instances in the same portal/website.
• ENH - compatible with Windows Azure Cloud.
• ENH - supported embed slideshow with optional extension "FancyGallery".
• ENH - supported "subscription management" panel and notification for blog owners/website admin about subscription changed, such as subscribed or unsubscribed.
• FIX - thumbnail issue with png transparent.
• FIX - daylight savings time issue with removing timezone option.
• FIX - always exception occurred when saving blog settings.
• FIX - meta description with html entities like '&amp ;' etc.
• FIX - trackback bug not based on blog settings.
• FIX - 'keywords' issue in the tag view and resolved it as "NOINDEX, FOLLOW".
• FIX - comments with HTML tags.
• FIX - resolved the upload button of post thumbnail not clickable.

NOTE: from v6.0 the SunBlogNuke will begin to not support DotNetNuke 5.x any more because it will utilize core APIs introduced from DNN6+, such as daylight savings time. If you are still using the dnn5, you don’t have to be worry about it because we will also maintain independent branch of the older version 5.8.x, which will always be compatible with dnn5 and may be updated with fixes without new features any more.

You can get it here. We hope that with this generation dnn blog module  you can enjoy the blog writing and it will make your life better; plus if you have any good advice about our products, please feel free to leave a comment or contact us.

The SunBlogNuke Team

Today I would like to show you one alternative way to feature related posts on your dnn blog. That is a external plugin [LinkWithin]. You should know most blogging platforms now feature a number of third-party plugins that can display a list of related stories on your blog, or even on other blogs on the Internet. Typically, these plugins will look at how a story was tagged and then display a short list of similar stories that use the same keywords. LinkWithin is the newest contender in this market. The plugin looks at tags, but it also analyzes other factors like relevancy, popularity, and recency. Unlike similar plugins, however, LinkWithin doesn't just display a list of headlines underneath each post, but also a thumbnail with a picture from each post, which makes it far more attractive than most of its competitors and is why I recommend it for you here.