SunBlogNuke - DotNetNuke Blog Module

As you know, currently DNN is growing bigger than what you expected and the latest version is 7.2 building with lots of awesome features. However, in my opinion, we encountered more and more problems in the same time – tons of versions with tons of existing bugs to be fixed. More frustrating things are that some bugs exists cross DNN4-DNN7 and still not fixed now even though they are created into issue tracker.  Well, if they are ignored with the official guys, let us check them out and address some workaround to fix them forever or temporarily. Today we get started to build a series of posts and share how we fighting DNN bugs these years :(

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.

That is one review post about our blogging module - #SunBlogNuke in depth, and you will find compare SunBlogNuke vs other DotNetNuke blogging modules and why clients choose our DNN modules. And the most benefits you get from us and what SunBlogNuke is the most flexible and user friendly module of the bunch. If you are hesitant to order our blogging module, I think that this review is what exactly you need go through :)

Actually everyone was looking forwards to DotNetNuke7, which should be equal to the so-called milestone, however, more expectations more disappointed. Let us take a look at the votes in codeplex – until today only average 2.8 rating with lots of lowest 1 star. In my opinion, that may be the lowest rating of all the releases before. Let’s make a discussion why it occurred and how we feel.

As you know, the DNN 6.2 Social API enables developers to write applications that access and control the activity feed, user relationships, social groups, user profiles and notifications. Quickly these are modules (not distributed with the core) that are integrated with new 6.2 features (relationships, journal, notifications, services framework, etc.), such as Active Forums 5.0 & DotNetNuke Q&A 1.x. Now our ultimate dnn module - #SunBlogNuke will be one member to embrace those social features, especially for the journal activity stream. Let us go through how to apply it now.

As you know, we would like to make CommesntPlus as the cross-module & highlight comments solution based on DotNetNuke platform, in other word, it should be a universal comments/voting system to be integrated with across multiple different modules on a dnn site. So the generic comment system is one essiontial feature to be implemented. Contratulations, now it have been included from v3.0 building.  Let us go through new attractive features now.

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 implementing 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.