Module Development

The portal system in DotNetNuke is one of its most powerful features. In this article we outline how the DotNetNuke portal system works and how it can save you money on your hosting bills.

We cover:

• Standard Hosting Method
• DotNetNuke Multiple Portal Method
• DotNetNuke Portals, Parent and Child
• Administration of Portals
• Host control: Premium modules, skins, disk space

DotNetNuke and Multiple Portals

(When to use Multiple Portals / Parent / Child or create a new DotNetNuke installation)

To help you consider which type of portal you should create, or whether you should create a new DotNetNuke installation, we have created a PDF mind map diagram which you can download for free.

DotNetNuke Portal Considerations

After completing this tutorial, you will have successfully downloaded the Install zip file, created a website, created the database and login for MSSQL 2000, setup the web.config file to work with the database, added an object qualifier (a prefix for all of your table names in the DotNetNuke database), and set up the installation so that you can do multiple installs of DotNetNuke.

In short, you will have a running DotNetNuke website that is ready to build out.

How to Install DotNetNuke 4.3.x with SQL Server

This tutorial explains how to enable registered users to customize their forum profile by selecting an avatar image from a selection of images stored in the portal files.

This is achieved by combining the ActiveForums module with the XMod Module. The tutorial outlines how we combined the two modules to work together.

Using XMod with Active Forums to select Avatars

This free video tutorial demonstrates a new shortcut in versions 4.3 and 3.3 of DotNetNuke which enables you to quickly edit module titles and text in the Text / HTML module.

How to Quickly Edit Module Titles and Text in DotNetNuke 3.3 and 4.3

In this article we give you an introduction to Google Adsense and provide some tips and resources for getting the most from Adsense on your websites. These tips will help you to improve your click-through-rate (CTR) and therefore your Adsense earnings.

Introduction to Google Adsense, how to easily monetize your website

This tutorial discusses the use of header tags and semantic code within DotNetNuke skins.

Using header tags can increase accessibility, enabling for instance speech browsers to understand the content of your pages, as well as the added benefit of enabling search engines to easily index your content. Header tags allow search engines to identify the topic of your website page, which should improve your search results.

The overall theme here is to allow various browser types / search engines to easily understand and interpret the content within your website pages and to create semantic code.

We analyze 5 pro websites for their design techniques and then apply these techniques to a DotNetNuke skin.

This tutorial is available as a 40 page PDF book.

The Free DotNetNuke Skinning Toolkit is an additional resource website that has been created by DNN Creative Magazine as issue 10 of the magazine.

The 98 page Skinning Toolkit demonstrates all of the skin classes within DotNetNuke so that you can easily view, search and learn how to style the various elements within a DotNetNuke skin.

In particular learn how to style the Solpart Menu, TreeMenu, Module Settings Menu, FileManager, Wizard, Main DNN classes (breadcrumbs, login links etc.)

One of the regular problems skin designers come across when creating their own skins is un-explained styles appearing in their designs.

This tutorial explains the various CSS files that are used within DotNetNuke and how inheritance works between each of the CSS files for styling your DotNetNuke skins.

Once you understand inheritance you can reduce the amount of code required to create a DNN skin and therefore decrease the load time of a page.

Free example CSS files are included for download.

Contrary to popular knowledge, the SolPartMenu provides full capabilities for options including root menus, child menus, vertical displayed menus and more. Knowing these flexibilities exist leads the designer into better and more adaptable website skins, as well as more robust and friendly navigation systems not ordinarily realized by most DNN users.

This article provides a deeper insight, as well as a few suggestions into the standard, yet not so well known, attributes of the SolPartMenu Skin Object.