DotNetNuke 5.6.2 Released

DotNetNuke 5.6.2 is officially released. DotNetNuke 5.6.2 release resolves a number of outstanding issues with the DNN 5.6.0 and DNN 5.6.1 versions and adds a few new significant enhancements including:

User Management
DNN 5.6.2 now includes the ability to restore or remove soft-deleted users. (Just like Active Directory) For more information on this feature you can read the recent blog post >> by Ash Prasad and follow Joe Brinkman's video post. >>

Performance Improvements
DNN 5.6.2 release includes 20 different performance enhancements that continues focusing on providing a fast, scalable web platform for delivering your content and applications to your users. A summary of the major features for DNN 5.6.2 release can be read at official DNN blogs. >>

For more information about a specific issue please refer to the official change log. >>

DotNetNuke SSO (single sign on) Authentication Solution

SSO (Single sign on) is neeed where multiple organizations would use each other's resources. Especially large organizations, schools and government systems using this method in order to provide rock solid authentication system across several locations.

With DotNetNuke you may also need to use such a solution. Then it comes to pick up correct single sign on authentication provider for DNN.

From Will's posts on DotNetNuke blogs:

Shibboleth, allowing you to have a standardized single sign on experience in DNN. While any 2 organizations or applications could use this standard, it has become a popular SSO technology in universities with schools like the University of Florida, UCLA, University of Arizona, Stanford University, University of Sussex, and many more. In fact, within a year of the initial Shibboleth release, over 150 organizations were using the standard. With this standard being so wildly popular within universities, it has been highly surprising to not see this project pop-up sooner. Factor in the amount of known DotNetNuke adoption in universities, this is that much more surprising. Enter in Nick Dunham and Cheryl Bearden of the University of Florida. Together, they built a provider for DNN sites to use the Shibboleth SSO standard for authentication. Shibboleth Authentication Provider for DotNetNuke This post was written for a couple of reasons… First, it was exciting to hear that this authentication provider existed. Second, I know that a lot of people will find value in using this provider, as there are many technologies and applications that use Shibboleth as their underlying SSO technology. Finally, I wanted to help the creators of this project get more eyes on it. I’d love to see this project get as popular as I know it could be! :) If you ever have SSO projects, check out this open source solution!

DotNetNuke 6 Hadron CTP Preview

March 2011 probably marks another milestone in the upcoming release of DotNetNuke Community Edition. Although it has been offered via DotNetNuke Beta Program for earlier releases to make the release stable; for the first time ever, DotNetNuke is now offering a Community Technology Preview that will allow you to begin testing the latest version for a quite long time before all issues and new features checked-in under Gemini.

CTP targets feedback from DotNetNuke Community members in order to provide a release that can be used in a production environment without critical issues.

Since it will be long run, me and my friends from Turkey will also provide feedback after testing all aspects of the new DotNetNuke 6 Hadron CTP.

As many of you know, we are providing DotNetNuke Turkish Language Packs and DotNetNuke Training under DotNetNuke Turkish Users Community Blogs.

How to Integrate Facebook Comments into your DotNetNuke Pages and DNN Modules

Last week, Chris Hammond posted an article that shows us how to implement Facebook Comments API into DotNetNuke contents. One of my clients had requested this feature a few years ago. They had a XMOD based news portal with missing comment addon. Unfortunately they didn't want to keep XMOD because of licensing costs. So they requested a transform. Instead of using a legacy release of XMOD i had to transform main structure to News Articles module from Ventrian Systems.

Although they were some Comments API out there in Snowcovered, I didn't want to deal with them because of static/dinamic display issue which has been covered by Chris Hammond as well.

However, Facebook Comments implementation is another story. Integrating facebook comments into DotNetNuke will power up your social integration and help you climb your ratings toward Facebook Users.

Sunblognuke, Ventrian News Articles or Default DotNetNuke Blog Module?

If you are looking for a alternative blog module for your DotNetNuke website, then I can provide a few suggestions. So far I have used default core DotNetNuke blog module, Ventrian's News Articles as a blog and SunBlogNuke for a client.

AFAIK all of them are receiving updates periodically. So, it depends on requirements and budget to choose which one to use. Ventrian also provides extra modules which would be useful for other purposes. Property Agent is the strongest one. Subscription fees are reasonable and templated interface of News Articles module helps you organize your templates quickly within a few clicks. The only thing you need to know and understand is Tokens plus basic HTML.

Templated interface also supported by SunBlogNuke and DNN's default core blog module. Again, If you need a professional support you can pick third party modules, however DNN Blog module also becomes stronger within each new release.

DotNetNuke 5.6.2 Beta Released

As of yesterday DotNetNuke 5.6.2 Community Edition Beta packages are now available for download from DotNetNuke Beta Downloads page.  DotNetNuke team members have made a number of bug fixes to the content management platform and implemented a long list of performance enhancements.

DotNetNuke 5.6.2 further stabilizes the DNN 5.6 platform and should be a solid foundation for any DotNetNuke site.  Please keep in mind that this is just a beta and is not intended for production use.  Upgrades to the final DotNetNuke 5.6.2 release are not supported.  They still have a few additional issues that expected to be resolved prior to Mid-March release of DNN Community Edition.