DotNetNuke

DotNetNuke 3.0.12 Released

sbwalker — Sun, 13 Mar 2005 01:16:14 GMT

New Version of Internationally Renowned Open Source Content Management System Released

“Changing the World Wide Web… one site at a time…”

Mar 12, 2005 -- Perpetual Motion Interactive Systems Inc., a premier Microsoft technology solutions provider, is pleased to announce the availability of DotNetNuke 3.0, the premier open source content management system for the Microsoft ASP.NET platform. This major release improves upon DotNetNuke’s vast array of extensibility and usability features; offering forward compatibility with the much anticipated Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 (Whidbey) platform, and adding powerful Localization and Search capabilities. DotNetNuke 3.0 is the culmination of nearly a year of development by an international team of contributors and developers.

“Our community has taken a giant step forward with this release,” said Shaun Walker, DotNetNuke creator and maintainer. “While the usability improvements in DotNetNuke 3.0 have simplified content management tasks for end-users on an international scale, the new portal framework has empowered developers and designers to create richer, more powerful application resources for the growing community. I am very proud of the development team who has worked so hard on this release over the past eleven months.”

DotNetNuke 3.0 includes a significant number of breakthrough enhancements which improve its versatility, power, and accessibility. These include a more intuitive user interface, support for “drag-and-drop” content management, improved URL structuring for search engine indexing, and enhanced provisioning support for scriptable configuration. In addition, the application underwent an extensive code access security review so that it is capable of running in a Medium Trust hosting environment.

The following is a handful of the new features and improvements in DotNetNuke 3.0:

Membership, Roles, and Profile Functionality -- Integration of the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 (Whidbey) Membership, Roles, and Profile API allows DotNetNuke to conform to a common Membership model.

Localization -- Administration user interfaces for DotNetNuke can now be easily localized into any language. The architecture is based on the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 (Whidbey) localization system.

Field & Module Help -- Localized field level help and module level help are now available on all administration user interfaces. This usability improvement helps transform DotNetNuke from a developer-oriented application to an intuitive end-user content management system.

Simplified & Organized Administrator UI – Administrator user interfaces have been reorganized to group common fields into collapsible sections to simplify the end-user experience, while still providing access to advanced functionality. A powerful new control panel has been added which encapsulates more of the common administrative functions.

Hoster Support – Improvements for Web Hosters include XML templates for scripting all aspects of the installation experience, feedback during the installation process, the ability to run in a Medium Trust environment, and optimized performance and memory consumption to maximize web server density.

The DotNetNuke 3.0 release also represents the launch of an exciting new program for the open source community. DotNetNuke will be sponsoring a number of third party sub-projects; providing an essential library of freely available, open source resources to augment the base portal framework. Sub-projects will conform to a set of formalized standards and will be able to take advantage of the established DotNetNuke infrastructure services and distribution channel. The first sub-projects to be announced are Forums, Blog, and Gallery modules contributed by AppTheory and TTT Corporation ( available immediately for BETA download from dotnetnuke.com ).

“We are very pleased to announce the contribution and release of the Forum, Blog and Gallery modules (based on the original code by Tam Tran Minh of TTT Corporation) as official DotNetNuke SubProjects” said Bryan Andrews of AppTheory, “These modules when integrated on the new DotNetNuke 3.x platform provide a compelling solution set for collaboration and community building and we know this contribution will be one of many exciting new DNN SubProjects!”

Availability and Pricing

DotNetNuke 3.0 is available for free download. The full application source code and sub-projects are distributed under a standard BSD open source license; providing the maximum freedom in both non-commercial and commercial environments. More information about DotNetNuke can be found by visiting http://www.dotnetnuke.com.

About DotNetNuke

DotNetNuke is a content management system (CMS) ideal for creating and deploying projects such as commercial web sites, corporate intranets, and online publishing portals. With a rapidly growing community of over 125,000 registered users and a legion of dedicated developers, DotNetNuke continues to strengthen its leadership position in the Microsoft open-source CMS market. The release of DotNetNuke 3.0, with its localization features and ASP.NET 2.0 provider API integration, will only add to DotNetNuke’s extensibility, international popularity, and support. More information about DotNetNuke is available at http://www.DotNetNuke.com.

About Open Source

The basic idea behind Open Source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, and people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

For more information, press only:

Shaun Walker
Perpetual Motion Interactive Systems Inc.
(604) 504-0514
sales@perpetualmotion.ca
http://www.dotnetnuke.com

DotNetNuke is a registered trademark of Perpetual Motion Interactive Systems Inc. All other registered and unregistered trademarks in this document are the sole property of their respective owners.

3.0.11 BETA Released

sbwalker — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 22:50:04 GMT

The 3.0.11 release will be the last *BETA* release for DotNetNuke 3.0. It has been a long journey... but the application has finally reached a level of stability which is acceptable for general distribution. We are pleased with the breadth of enhancements offered in 3.0 and hope the community appreciates the amount of effort encapsulated in this latest evolution.

The only item remaining for DotNetNuke 3.0 FINAL is integration of an updated MemberRole component from Microsoft. The original MemberRole component was based on the Whidbey API from July 2004 and contained a EULA which did not allow for production use. The latest MemberRole component which we received yesterday, has been updated to conform to the most recent changes in the Whidbey API and contains a EULA which allows for production use. The integration and regression testing will likely take a couple weeks ( work is already underway in this area ). The good news is that because we essentially wrapped the MemberRole component and treated it as a "black box", the integration effort should be minimal.

You can also expect a few other usability modifications in the final build. These are necessary to address some of the excellent feedback we have received from you in this Forum. Specifically we want to make the task of adding a new module to a page much more flexible and intuitive from a permissions perspective. We also want to improve the portability of skins by enhancing the parsing logic.

We appreciate your ongoing commitment and patience and look forward to another growth year in 2005.

DotNetNuke 3.0 Announcement...

sbwalker — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 07:04:46 GMT

It is my privilege to announce that the next version of DotNetNuke will be officially released as version 3.0.

The upcoming release simply contains too many significant enhancements to be considered a "point release". In addition to many small fixes and enhancements, look for all of these major features:

* Membership/Roles/Profile - integration of the Microsoft Whidbey ( ASP.NET 2.0 ) Membership/Roles/Profile provider API ( Microsoft graciously supplied us with a version of this provider which runs on ASP.NET 1.1 ). Integration of this provider allows us to conform to a common membership model which enables us to "play nicely" with other ASP.NET applications who adopt this API. It also puts us in the enviable position of being able to migrate to Whidbey with minimal effort in this area.

* Static Localization - all user interfaces have been modified so that their static resources are abstracted into resource files. The architecture conforms to the data storage format and page processing techniques in ASP.NET 2.0. This has been a monumental effort but it also results in some incredible benefits. All of the administration for DotNetNuke can now be easily localized into other cultures - exposing DotNetNuke to a vast international community. Initially we will be delivering English and German resources but, as always, we will be supplying expert tools to empower users to create and distribute resource packs for other cultures as well.

* Field & Module Level User Help - all admin user interfaces now have localized field level help text as well as localized module level help text. This usability improvement helps transform DotNetNuke from a developer-oriented application to a an end-user content management system.

* Simplified/Organized Administration UI - admin user interfaces have been reorganized to group common fields into collapsible sections to simplify the end user experience, yet still provide access to advanced functionality.

* Common Tasks - the Control Panel metaphor has been improved to include more of the common administration options at your fingertips. In accordance with our focus on extensibility, we have also added the ability for developers to create custom Control Panels which can be positioned anywhere within the admin interface.

* WYSIWYG - a new ClientAPI has been added which contains client side support for dragging and dropping modules for the Administrator as well as client side Min/Max of module content.

* File Management - DotNetNuke will finally support subfolders within each portal's upload directory. This includes replacement File Manager, File Uploader, and File Picker controls. This feature has been a long time coming and will enable you to effectively organize your content files.

* Portal Search - implementation of an Optional Interface model which allows module developers to publish summarized content to a central data store for portal-wide searching. Modules simply need to implement a single Search method in their controller class. Again, this solution is completely extensible - it is provider based to allow third parties to build custom Indexing engines which can easily be plugged in using common provider techniques.

* Friendly URLs - improvements to the URL specification within DotNetNuke to encode parameters as part of a "friendly" URL structure. This enables search engine spiders and robots to effectively index your DotNetNuke site for maximum exposure.

* Tabs - tabs can now point to an external URL, a local file, or even another tab within the portal. There is also the ability to schedule tab publication using Start and End schedule dates.

* Modules - modules now have the ability to specify a header and/or footer block which can be used to decorate module content. There is also the ability to schedule module publication using Start and End schedule dates.

* Banners - improvements to the banner advertising system to allow for better organization, Text ads ( similar to Google Adsense ), horizontal display, etc..

* And much... much... more...

The version 3.0 designation also relates to module compatibility

As part of our ongoing commitment to the community, we always try to preserve binary compatibility between version upgrades to ensure a smooth transition for end users and developers. In the past we have been largely successful in this philosophy - generally at the expense of more complicated core development and testing as well as the inclusion of code bloat to support deprecated legacy functionality.

Unfortunately, the implementation of the Microsoft Whidbey ( ASP.NET 2.0 ) Membership/Roles/Profile provider API has introduced at least one unavoidable "breaking change" in the 3.0 version.

Under the new Membership system, Context.User.Identity.Name now contains the UserName value - whereas DotNetNuke has always expected this to contain a UserID. Modules which have included direct references to Context.User.Identity.Name will no longer function correctly. This includes most third party modules, as it is best practice to store some audit information in your modules related to the user who last updated a database record. The code change is minimal ( there is now a shared UserInfo object which provides access to all user profile data within your modules ) - but it is still a code change - which means that 2.x modules will no longer function in 3.0.

Rest assured that we investigated various ways to deal with this problem but any alternative just looked like an ugly workaround. The future direction of ASP.NET would seem to indicate that Context.User.Identity.Name is expected to be a username and any deviation we make now will surely haunt us in the long run. So a decision was made to allow this "breaking change" which necessitated a new application version number for clarity.

Once we got past the philosophical impact of this "breaking change", we began to look at a number of other critical changes which we had been withholding for many months ( in favour of preserving binary compatibility ). The timing seemed opportune, so we decided to take advantage of this release to introduce a few other breaking changes for the long term benefit of the application. The concept is that making all of these changes in one breaking release, will help to avoid the prospect of other breaking changes any time in the near future.

For module developers and others interested in the details of any specific breaking change, we will conduct those discussions in the Core Framework forum. Several items have been specifically posted already... and others will follow. The changes required to adapt to these breaking changes in your modules will be minimal ( mainly just a recompile of your code ) but at the same time we will be providing some suggestions on best practices to follow when creating/upgrading your custom modules for 3.0 ( ie. the new Search functionality, Localization, etc... ).

DotNetNuke

DotNetNuke 3.0.12 Released

3.0.11 *BETA* Released

DotNetNuke 3.0 Announcement...

3.0.11 BETA Released