June 2008
Welcome to issue 33 of DNN Creative Magazine.
Following on from our special SQL issue last month, we are dedicating another full issue to improving the efficiency of your administration time with DotNetNuke using SQL queries.
The SQL methods we show you this month are very powerful techniques which will reduce weeks of work into seconds. These tutorials are especially useful if you are re-skinning a large DotNetNuke installation.
To begin with we demonstrate how to update the Page Settings of a page using SQL queries.
We then demonstrate how to use SQL queries to delete a group of modules from a page, move modules between content panes and insert a copy of a module to a page. If you were to manually move, delete and insert modules when re-skinning your DotNetNuke installation it could take up to 10 minutes per page, for a 500 page website this would take 5000 minutes. Using SQL queries will allow you to apply changes across your entire site within seconds.
Following this we take a look at the DotNetNuke SQL Module. This module comes free with DotNetNuke and is only available to the host user on your DotNetNuke installation. This module allows you to execute SQL queries without the need for SQL Server Express. Although we thoroughly recommend you use SQL Server Express to build and check your queries, this module is very useful if you already have a good understanding of SQL queries.
And finally, we demonstrate how to work with Skins and Containers in DotNetNuke using SQL queries. In the previous tutorials we demonstrated how to change a container on a single page, in this tutorial we show you how to change the container for a copied module that is displayed on all or several pages, how to change the container of a module to a new container based on the name of the old container, and how to change the skin of a page to a new skin based on the name of the old skin.
As you can see, using all of the techniques outlined in this issue will literally save you weeks of work.
This issue comes complete with 11 video tutorials.