DNN Tutorials for Advanced Users

This tutorial explores methods to combat spam in your DotNetNuke website. In particular we focus on Active Forums and show you how to create scheduled SQL queries to prevent spam displaying in your forum. Spam can be a time consuming nuisance to both the administrators and the visitors of your website, so this tutorial helps you to automate the prevention of spam.

The videos contain:

• Video 1 - Introduction, Basic Steps for Discouraging Spam
• Video 2 - Typical Spammer Profiles, Giving Users Trusted Access Using SQL
• Video 3 - Creating the SQL Query to Combat SPAM
• Video 4 - How to Schedule the SQL Query

Total Time Length: 35min 56secs

This tutorial demonstrate the ASCX method of DotNetNuke skinning. This is the method that the professional DotNetNuke skinners use as it is much quicker to build skins in this way.

We explain the concepts of DotNetNuke ASCX skinning, how to setup Visual Web Developer Express to enable the skin token attribute suggestions, how to use ASCX skin tokens, how to make quick edits to tokens and instantly see them on your DotNetNuke website, how to display two tokens of the same type - for instance two menus, how to use skinpath for images, how to view the attributes that are available for a skin token, how to speed edit CSS code, how to quickly create additional skins using the ASCX method and instantly view them within your DotNetNuke installation, and finally how to work with ASCX Containers.

The videos cover:

• Video 1 - Introduction, Pros and Cons of ASCX Skinning
• Video 2 - Introduction to ASCX Skin Code and Setup in VWD Express
• Video 3 - How to Edit The ASCX Tokens, Configuring the Search Token
• Video 4 - How to Display 2 Nav Menus, How to Use SKINPATH for Images
• Video 5 - Skin CSS Code Speed Editing in ASCX skins
• Video 6 - Containers ASCX skinning

This article sets out some key guidelines for creating forms.

By taking into consideration the tips outlined in this article you can plan and create a form just how you originally conceived it.

If forms are not planned out properly from the conceptual stage they can easily evolve and become complicated. Over complicated forms can reduce the users interest drastically, thus damaging your chances of obtaining the information you require.

This tutorial demonstrates a method for quickly adding large amounts of data into a DotNetNuke module. The module in this example is the core Documents module.

Throughout the tutorial we walk you through the methods used for investigating how to add large amounts of data into the Documents module so that you can adapt these methods to add content to other modules.

The videos contain:

• Video 1 - Introduction, Initial Demonstration with Documents Module
• Video 2 - Testing, Errors and Link Tracking Tables
• Video 3 - Creating an Excel file of Data for the Documents Module
• Video 4 - Copying the Data from Excel to SQL Server, Testing, Adding Files

Total Time Length: 40mins

This tutorial outlines how to setup a Podcast website using DotNetNuke. We demonstrate how we setup the podcasts on dotnetnukepodcast.com right through to submitting your podcast to the iTunes store.

The videos contain:

• Video 1 - Dotnetnukepodcast.com, Configuring the Ventrian News Articles Module
• Video 2 - Feedburner.com, Creating an RSS feed
• Video 3 - Promoting the RSS feed using the iTunes Player

Total Time Length: 22min

This tutorial demonstrates how you can use the styles drop down list in the FCK editor to format the text.

Using the styles drop down list allows you to quickly apply CSS classes from your skin.css file and should help to ensure that administrators do not use bad practices for styling text, such as using font tags.

The videos contain:

• Video 1 - Styling the Background of the Style Dropdown List in the FCK Editor
• Video 2 - List of Available Styles for the FCK Editor
• Video 3 - Dynamic Styles in the FCK Editor
• Video 4 - How to Create Custom Styles
• Video 5 - Creating Class Styles in the Style Dropdown List
• Video 6 - How to Customise Block Quotes with Different Classes

Total Time Length: 48mins

This tutorial demonstrates how to create your own HTML templates for the FCK Editor in DotNetNuke.

HTML templates are really useful for adding repetitive content into a page; they can give you a starting point when adding content to the page, you do not need to start from scratch, you can simply select a template as a starting point and then edit the content within the template. This will help to reduce errors created by content editors.

The videos contain:

• Video 1 - Introduction, the FCKtemplates.xml file
• Video 2 - How to Create a Custom HTML Template

Total Time Length: 16mins

The FCK Editor allows you to customize which toolbar buttons are available for use, this is called a toolbar set. In this tutorial we demonstrate how to create your own custom toolbar sets in the FCK Editor and how you can assign different toolbar sets to various security roles.

The videos contain:

• Video 1 - How to Create a Custom Toolbar Set
• Video 2 - How to Set Security Role Access for the FCK Editor toolbars
• Video 3 - How to Check Toolbar Access for Security Roles

Total Time Length: 24mins

This tutorial demonstrates some of the further configuration options available within the FCK editor.

We walk you through some of the additional configuration options that are available to use in your DotNetNuke installations. These additional options will also provide you with the knowledge for researching and configuring any additional FCK editor options.

The videos contain:

• Video 1 - FCK Editor, ‘Other Editor Options’, Further Configurations
• Video 2 - Advanced Configuration Options using the FCKConfig.js file

Total Time Length: 13mins

This tutorial demonstrates how to alert content administrators when adding incorrect HTML content to a DotNetNuke portal.

Alert styles is a new concept we have been working on for ensuring that the content administrators of a DotNetNuke portal add content using good practices.

Time Length: 10mins