SunBlogNuke - DotNetNuke Blog Module

As Day of DotNetNuke Charlotte 2012 coming soon and the dnn 6.2 will be released in May 15. We would like to be ready for this important updates with a ton of new capabilities, more excellently for us is that it includes two huge areas:  social and service framework. In order to make everything run well, yesterday we began to upgrade our dnn website sunblognuke.com with stable core framework version 6.1.5 firstly. It took some hours to complete the whole upgrade process, including some fixes & UI adjustments. In this post we will share a bit around the growing pains that were experiences throughout the process and hope it helps with everyone, who also like to upgrade their dnn website.

Image slideshow and content slider are now very popular with thousands of blogs and dnn websites. Indeed it is really useful to show the featured contents and to attract your visitors with more web traffic. In order to fit so common requirements, there are many dnn modules that provide some sort of slideshow/rotator/banner/slider functionality and on sale in DNN Store. Today we would like to showcase our brand gallery module with implemeting the same feature with more attractive effects.

Finally the SunBlogNuke 5.0 is available to free upgrade today and it will be first version of next generation blog optimized for DNN5 & DNN6. In this building we completed few critical performance optimizations with cache mechanism and enhanced admin panels with uniform UI for better user experience, for example, we provided a new dashboard, which allows you to see the both published and draft posts, categories, tags, and comments pending approval at a quick glance.

Major Highlights in v5.0:

• ENH - Implemented paging control with better user experience.
• ENH - Included dashboard panel with lots of awesome widgets, such as Statistics & Quick Press.
• ENH - Optimized theme configure.
• FIX - Bookmark not compatible with the latest 'sharethis' widget code.
• FIX - Update failure on the configure 'Module Extension' panel due to invalid email address field.
• FIX - Import bug with blogml - views & permalink not updated correctly.

NOTE: from v5.0 the SunBlogNuke will begin to not support dnn4 any more because it will utilize lots of core APIs introduced from DNN5+, such as Taxonomy. If you are still using the dnn4, you don’t have to be worry about it because we will also maintain independent branch of the older version 4.x, which will always be compatible with dnn4 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

One of our dnn module products - CommentsPlus is becoming more popular in the dnn environment recently but lots of clients requested more features. And one raised frequently is that it should be built with generic built-in comment system for DotNetNuke website but right now it just integrated with 3rd party comment engines, such as Disqus or Facebook comments. We would like to say sorry for all the clients if it made you confused even this awesome feature included in our roadmap. Meanwhile we will try our best to implement it as built-in comments for dnn as we promised. FYI, in future we will also integrated Google+ comments if it is available :)

Now I just would like to complete the tutorial for Facebook comments integration. Actually the configuration process is similar with Disqus section (Take a  look at it if you are not familiar with this process):

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

2) Switch to Facebook comments with checking the option [Comment type] as "Facebook". Those options are so self-explained and easily configured;plus some notes below":

• Application Key: it is "API Key" generated by your own application and requires you create it in the Facebook developer. And please refer to this recourse - How to get Facebook Api key.
• 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.

3) Click "Update" to save the settings.

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

If you need any help or question please feel free to leave your advice or comments.

If you are finding a highlight solution to display pictures on your DNN website, the Gallery Plus module will be exactly what you need. It is ultra photo gallery framework built on top of DotNetNuke(DNN) platform. The aim is to simplify the process of creating professional image galleries and slideshows for the dnn website.  Out of the box, 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.

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. 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.

If you are finding a highlight solution to display your most recent Twitter updates on your DNN website, the "Twitter Feed widget" module will be exactly what you need. With the free widget, it is easy to integrate the twitter feed into the sidebar of dnn blog to show your latest tweets.

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.

This post was summarized with the original forum post "Post Blog Entries from Office 2010".

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 :)

As you know, we released a new cross-module & highlight comments solution based on DotNetNuke platform a while ago. We hope to build a universal comments/voting system to be integrated with across multiple different modules on a dnn site. And this awesome module was announced as "Comments+". You may be interested in what sets Comments+ apart from other DNN comment modules, please visit the post Ultra DNN Comments System - CommentsPlus in details. Today we would like to show you how to get started with CommentsPlus. Until now, this module allows you to add the popular comments engine Disqus or Facebook in any page of your DotNetNuke website. So the tutorial will cover Disqus & Facebook section.

If you are focusing on our dnn products, you should know this new awesome module - comments+. We would like to make it as the cross-module & highlight comments solution based on DotNetNuke platform, in other word, it will be a universal comments/voting system to be integrated with across multiple different modules on a dnn site. Until now, this module allows you to very easily add the popular comments engine, such as Disqus & Facebook comments, any page on your DotNetNuke website, and also attach it to a specific module on the page. Let us go through the super features in Comments+.