SunBlogNuke - DotNetNuke Blog Module

If you are a SunBlogNuke user, maybe you are missing some awesome and essential features, like ContentSlider Widget and Authors Widget. Now we would like to remind you the 2 core widget modules in SunBlogNuke you should know.

What is ContentSlider Widget?

One utility module, enables #DNN administrator to place this module on a web page and point to a specific blog. This is a good feature to highlight one of the featured blog on a landing page to direct website visitor to the blog. It allow you to display a list of posts, like featured post and latest posts. Also you can add this widget module to any page at any time and point it to any blog on the portal.

You can visit the previous post Enhance Featured Widget Module with More Customizations and learn how to extend what you want in your dnn website.

What is Authors Widget?

Another utility module, enables DNN administrator to place this module on the blog page and display a list of authors for the blog.

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.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo announced support for a new 'Canonical Link Element' in the header of your website page that will help clean-up duplicate url's that have been indexed by search engines. This issue is so specially serious in DotNetNuke that there are duplicated contents returned for different urls. And we ever supplied a handy solution for our blogging module – SunBlogNuke in the tutorial - SEO Best Practices for DNN Blog Posts.

Today we released the new SEO extension - the alternative way to build the canonical link for your dnn blog post to avoid duplicate Urls. 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 Canonical.cs' into the folder $ROOT/bin/Blog_Extensions. If not exist please create it at first.
3) Open up the web.config and make sure that the blog extension element there. If not exist, add the directory 'Blog_Extensions' in the element [codeSubDirectories] and it looks like 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 canonical meta tags to your blog post.

BTW, you may be interested in the similar guidelines about other awesome blog extensions:

Integrated Social Graph into DNN Blog

Post Comment to Journal of Active Social

Hope it helps. Blog your way and enjoy life. :)

Today we are glad that the building v4.4.5 of Ultimate DotNetNuke blog module –  SunBlogNuke is available for free upgrade. It implemented the initial subscription feature with a brand new widget called "Subscription", where you can place into your blog sider bar for users to subscribe the email notification when new post published; in the meanwhile, initially it introduced the extension mechanism with more flexibility and extendibility,  with which you will extend the core framework easily and implemented the customized business logic. For example, you would like to support Markdown Syntax in comments or auto-publish to twitter/facebook (any 3rd-party social services) when writing a new post, now you can complete it by implementing the customized extensions, such as Markdown Extension or Twitter Extension. More awesome widgets are included into this building, such as alternative "Archives" widget and "Profile" widget to show the profile of your blog authors with handy template and tokens. Later we will publish more tutorials about those topics and please stay tune. As usual, the complete details for all of the changes can be found in the Release Notes.

Major Highlights in v4.4.5:

• ENH - Supported new 'Archives' widget, which allows you to show the blog archives with flexible settings in any page of dnn website.
• ENH - Supported new handy 'Profile' widget, which you can integrate with to show the profile of your blog authors .
• ENH - Supported new fields [PublishedDate] & [LastModifiedBy] in the post entity.
• ENH - Supported new tokens {block:customfield:xxx} and {else} in the Content Slider Widget.
• ENH - Supported to develop customized controls, which may be originally in the 'shared' folder, for the current theme.
• ENH - Supported the plus view with quick way to deal with common tasks, such as approve comment & regenerate links.
• ENH - Enhanced the Disqus integration.
• ENH - Enhanced search result view.
• ENH - Released the additional language resource packages - Spanish & Italian.
• FIX - Possible XSS vulnerability issue in the Rsd hander.
• FIX - Monthly Archive list collapses when Month clicked.
• Lots of other fixes & enhancements.

NOTE: 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.

Note that some issues may occur if your original version of SunBlogNuke is lower version, like 3.x, and you've developed your customized theme. Please refer to the tutorial - Must-Read Note for SunBlogNuke v4.x and follow the instructions. Hope it makes sense.

You can get it here. Blog your way and enjoy life. :)

The SunBlogNuke Team