Thank you to all who participated in the DotNetNuke case study presented this past Monday at the St. Louis DotNetNuke User Group meeting.

I wanted to include my slide deck for any of you who are interested as it contains a couple of items that were not mentioned in the meeting.  

I also wanted to answer a couple of questions that were not answered Monday.  Mainly in terms of the navigation.

1. The primary navigation Mega Menu uses the AZ.DNNMenu.
   http://dnn-menu.com
   
   
2. The primary navigation side menu for the sites within a site uses the RadMenu.

If you have any further questions, please leave a comment.

****** UPDATE (9/30/2011) ******

Due to time constraints, we were unable to cover all the challenges faced in building out the client’s new DotNetNuke site during Monday's User Group meeting.

I am happy to elaborate on the items that were not touched on, but would like to say that some of the challenges are more in line with feature requests. However, they are worth mentioning as they come from individuals who are utilizing DotNetNuke Pro in a real world environment on a daily basis.

Challenges & Solutions Continued...

Work flow

• Work flow override for Administrators
  
  
  • Once work flow was implemented, we quickly realized that there was no way to override work flow, other than removing it completely. Essentially, when a site administrator wants to post content to the site, he or she is still bound by the constraints of work flow. This behavior is understandable, but a request was made for Administrators to be given the ability to override work flow in the case of a “content emergency.” Possibly a check box that only shows up for administrators that reads “override work flow.”
    
    
• Work flow e-mail notification additional details
  
  
  • Work flow e-mail notifications lacked specific details in regards to what user was making updates to the site. Including the user name, date, and time of the update would make nice additions to the notification e-mail.

Page Caching

• Turning on caching at the page level caused DotNetNuke to use Windows-1252 character encoding vs. utf-8 character encoding. This change in encoding created odd symbols/characters to appear within the content.
  
  SOLUTION: This issue was a known bug in previous versions of DotNetNuke and was addressed in version 5.6.3. 
  
  

.Net URL Character Limit

• Due to the size of the site, we reached the maximum allowed characters for a URL string. The complete URL would not display in the browser URL bar.
  
  SOLUTION: Upgrading the .Net framework to .Net 4.0 allowed us to increase the maximum allowable characters.

External Links

• The client required the ability to link to an external website via the Link Url page settings and have that link open in a new window. The user interface does not offer the functionality to have external links open in a new window at the page settings level.

I hope this helps clarify the last couple of items we missed.  Again, if you have any questions, please leave a comment.

Cheers

As a kid, I would come home after school, open up my favorite comic books, and draw what I saw.  I spent countless hours drawing characters and even going so far as to draw copies of entire pages of comic books.  As an adult, I find myself with little time to draw, but I want that to change.  The following drawing is an exercise for me in patience and technique as well as an effort to make time to draw.  It is a drawing of Spawn created by Todd Mcfarlane (who happens to make some pretty amazing toys).  I used Todd's artwork for reference.

Line Art - 7.25 hours, Colors - 4.25 hours, Total - 11.5 hours 

Photoshop and a Wacom.

Mouse over the image to see this drawing at its various stages of completion.

About 15 or 20 minutes with SketchBook Pro for the iPad.

A couple of quick 5-10 minute gesture drawings from reference.

I came across the following videos by Gary Glass, the director of American Homebrewers Association and thought they did a great job of walking through the various ingredients, equipment, and processes it takes to make a batch of beer.  I hope you enjoy.

About 2 hours with SketchBook Pro for the iPad.

A quick 20 minute sketch at various stages using SketchBook Pro for iPad.  The app is great, but I have to admit that drawing with my fingers feels a bit awkward...

Quick 45 minute sketch just for fun.

For the past two or three months, I have had the distinct privilege of working in depth with the DotNetNuke Professional edition. Most notably with the extended permissions and advanced work flow options. The combination of these two very powerful pieces of functionality gives the end user almost limitless options in how he or she wishes to configure his or her website.

The site that I have been working on for the past few months is utilizing DotNetNuke to its full capacity. The complex and intricate permission grid and work flow system they have in place is amazing, but there have certainly been a few bumps and surprises getting it all in set up.

Most notably, we have created for ourselves an issue in regards to the ability to edit of module titles. The particular needs of this client dictate that “website editors” have access to update module content and module titles, but only through a specific work flow. Obviously, we did not want to give these users the ability to manage module settings as that would allow them to change/bypass the work flow in place. We quickly discovered that when we revoked rights to module settings that we also revoked the ability to change the modules title. We thought that enabling the inline editors available in (Admin > Site Settings | Advanced Settings | Usability Settings | ) would allow for module title updates, but it would appear that even the inline editors are bound by the module settings permissions. The inline editors for content work as expected, but module titles are not editable. Thus we now have a scenario where our website editors can add modules, delete modules, and edit the content of said modules, but not edit the modules title.

I'm not sure if this is by design or just an issue that found its way into the permissions/work flow schema unintentionally, but it seems to be an issue.

If anyone else has experienced this type of issue or knows something I'm missing, I would really like to hear from you.

This is a drawing I did around the age of 13.  It's based off the cover art for Wolverine #37 Blood and Claws Part 3 originally done by Marc Silvestri.  That was a great series!