iFinity

One of the most visited entries on this blog is How to 301 redirect .htm or .html Urls to DotNetNuke pages.  From that post, I get a lot of enquiries how to do this with .asp Urls.  I have usually just told people to substitute the .htm in the post with .asp, but I’ve decided to dedicate another post just to the task of converting/redirecting ‘Classic’ ASP urls over to a DotNetNuke website.  It would seem a lot of people are replacing old ASP websites with a DotNetNuke based system (a good choice!) so this should be the final word in keeping them pointed in the right direction.

So without further discussion, let’s get straight into the steps.

Step 0 : Backup You’ll be (probably) be making changes to your web.config file, and it’s possible to mess up your entire site with a misplaced punctuation mark.  Take a copy of that file now and thank yourself later.  You can always delete a backup but you can’t conjure one back from the dead.

Step 1 : Install Ur l Master Module You’ll need the...

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Recently, Keivan Beigi posted an article on the DNN Blog about how DotNetNuke 5.5 was faster than DotNetNuke 4.9.5.  This post generated a flurry of emails to my inbox wondering whether the new version of Url Master compared to this.   I have already posted about the relative performance of Url Master and the standard DotNetNuke Url Rewriter which showed that the Url Master module was faster than the standard DotNetNuke Url Rewriter/Friendly Url Provider by a small margin.  In that post, my aim was to determine the difference in speed with no-extensions vs .aspx extensions (conclusion : not significant) – finding out that the standard Friendly Url Provider was slower was an unexpected result.

So with the release...

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Today is the announcement of a release about 18 months in the making.  I started out with a quick sketch of functionality for a major upgrade of the Url Master module and added some of these points into my issues tracking system back in June 2008, only months after the first release.  A roadmap and prototyping was started in January 2009 and the Version 1.x code was branched in April 2009, the first workable Alpha version was going by January.  But as any developer knows, the 90% complete mark means that 90% of the work is yet to be done.  Finally that is the case and the module is ready for the wider DotNetNuke community, and I think it will make a big impact on what DotNetNuke site owners can expect from the platform with regards to Urls.

What’s new in Url Master 2.0 The main areas where the 1.x versions could be improved was in these key areas:

- Portal specific settings : most of the settings were specific to an entire DotNetNuke installation and all settings were applied to all portals.

...

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My last update of the iFinity Google Analytics provider was back in December 2007 – and a lot has changed since then.  Probably the biggest change is the inclusion of a standard Analytics provider in the DotNetNuke core.  That doesn’t seem to have dented enthusiasm for the iFinity Google Analytics provider, with nearly 6,000 downloads since it’s original release and still running at a healthy rate of about 7 downloads per day.

With my work on Multi-Language Urls for DotNetNuke with the Url Master module, I have setup the Url Master demonstration site which shows how to setup language-specific sub-domains to tidy up and optimise the Urls on a DotNetNuke site.  Here’s the sub-domains created for the site:

fr.url-master.com – French language version nl.url-master.com – Dutch language version de.url-master.com – German language version ...

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This is the second post in my series illustrating functionality which will be available with the release of the Url Master, version 2.0.

The previous post covered the new 404 Error Handling features, this post will discuss the new Multi-Language (ML) features that the module incorporates.

Like better 404 error handling, people using the Url Master module soon started to request support of multi-language Urls.  While Url Master 1.x versions did work perfectly well with ML sites, and shuffled the /language/xx-YY Url forwards in the path, so that it at least appeared to have a path structure related to the language, this was about all that could be achieved.

The first thing that was needed was the ability to localize Urls for a specific language, and to get the Urls to work without the /language/xx-YY stuck in the middle of the Url.

The next thing was to work out the best SEO strategy...

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One of the features of early DotNetNuke was the ability to track clicks of particular links within the site.  You could work out how many people clicked on a link on a certain page.

This is one of those features which is actually of limited use these days – a good web analytics package will give you that detail, and a whole lot more.  There wasn’t even a link click report you could look at to see the result – though I have written one of these you can use.

However, the ‘LinkClick’ approach still litters the DotNetNuke framework and can get ordinary people into difficulty with their SEO efforts.

The problems with the LinkClick handler The LinkClick handler is a generic Url which looks like http://example.com/linkclick.aspx?tabid=234&moduleid=355.  It can be thought of as a generic redirector, like Microsoft used to use for everything...

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404 Handling is the process of managing what happens when a visitor comes to your site and enters a Url/follows a link which isn't valid.  The correct handling of 404 errors can really mean the different between a professional looking site, and one that still looks like it is in development.  The name ‘404 Error’ is used because the web server returns a response code of ‘404’, meaning it couldn’t find a matching file/resource for the Url.

A well developed 404 strategy will retain users, keep search engines up to date and in general make your site look like a polished and finished effort.

This post takes a look at what happens when a 404 occurs, how DotNetNuke handles it, and how the new version of Url Master (2.0) can handle 404 errors.

Background on DotNetNuke 404 Error Handling. In order to discuss issues behind DotNetNuke 404 handling, it’s worthwhile to just take a background look at how DotNetNuke...

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1. Use Html in the File for better layout in the install pages This one comes from the blog of Erik VB : use html in the manifest file by including A CDATA section is a way of including xml/html within an xml file.  As a manifest file is just a big xml file, you can use this to your advantage and include cdata sections for various pieces of information.  For example, instead of providing an email address, here’s what’s in my manifiest file:

Contact Page]]>

When the module installs, instead of getting a plain listing of an email address, this gives a link to the page on the iFinity website for contact.    You can also see in the below screenshot that the Url is an actual link to the site.

...

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A question that I field on a regular basis is ‘what performance implications are there for switching off page extensions on my DotNetNuke site?’.   If you peek around various posts and blogs, you’ll see dire warnings from people predicting the end of your server as you know it.   The main problem people have is that, when you switch off page extensions, all of the processing for all requests on the server are routed through the ASP.NET runtime, which has to serve up not only the dynamic ASP.NET pages, but all of the static content (js files, jpg files, css files et al) as well. 

My response to people has always been : switch it on and see what happens,  if your site becomes too slow then turn it back off again.  My advice tends to be of a practical nature in this respect.  My own site has been running without extensions for years, and while it is known to have the occasional hiccup, that’s never been to do with the missing .aspx on the Urls.

However, I decided to do a little bit of comparison with...

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I’ve come across this problem a few times, and have usually just worked my way around it.

The problem is when you want to create a list of Radio Buttons to display on a page, and you need to show these with other data, using an ASP.NET repeater (or DataList, or DataGrid).

Here’s what your code might look like:





















If you run a DataBind to show values for this repeater, the Html will end up something like this:

    One     name="rptValues$ctl01$options" />     name="rptValues$ctl01$txtValue" />

    Two     name="rptValues$ctl02$options" />     name="rptValues$ctl02$txtValue" />

(Note I haven’t shown the ‘code behind’ here, just take it that I have bound to a string list which consists of ‘one’ and ‘two’)

Because the two ‘radio’ inputs have a different ‘name’ attribute, then they will act independently of each other, and you’ll be...

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