Once again, November 28 2007, was time for another Capital DotNetNuke User Group meeting.
A good buddy of mine, Alec Whittington was supposed to help me out with this presentation since he happened to be in town, but unfortunately he had to return home earlier than expected. Alec is also a project lead for the DotNetNuke Links module and is well known and respected within the DNN community. I am sure the User Group members would have enjoyed meeting him in person. Oh well.... he'll be back!
Although I literally had only an hour to prepare for this presentation, the session went very well, albeit we found a few undocumented bugs along the way. I always have fun at these meetings!
Here is what I found new in DotNetNuke 4.7:
Modules:
- Store
- We really did not get to play around this all that much due to time constraints, but what I know is that this is the first release of the store module since it was taken over and revived by Will Morgenweck. I personally know some of Will's magic work and I am sure that in time this module will become as robust as any of his other commercial products.
- Marketplace
- This module allows you to simply provide your merchant id that you would get from the DotNetNuke Marketplace in order to generate referrals from people that click on the image. Honestly, I think the community could have done without this module, but hey, it's in there.
Authentication:
There are now 5 different authentication providers in DNN. In fact, some of these were available in 4.6.2 but I figured I would bundle them in here as well.
While going through a demonstration of LiveID we did find some bugs that were already reported by the community and that I know are being worked on for future releases. Nevertheless, these are some cool features to have out of the box!
- LiveId
- OpenId
- Cardspace
- AD
- DNN
Newsletter:
The newsletter really needed some TLC, and it got just that with 4.7.
- Token Replacement
- You can now include TOKEN in the body of your email and they will be replaced at run-time to build the dynamic emails that you've always wanted. Sebastian Leupold has detailed a lot of this in this post.
- Language
- Gives you the ability to write a newsletter in different languages.
- Role Groups Filtering
- For sites with TONS of roles and groups, gives you the ability to filter roles by group.
Host Settings:
- Enable Ajax
- You can now enable/disable Ajax entirely from here. This is good for those that are hosted on environments which do not support ASP.net Ajax yet.
Portals:
Although I am not sure if this one was introduce only in 4.7, but that's when I found :)
- Delete Expired Portals
- This is useful for those that allow for public portal sign-up with a free trial. It allows you to clean up all those expired and unused portals taking up all that space in db. I am not sure if it delete the portal folders, but I'll try that and post an update to this post.
Module Definitions:
- Enable partial rendering for each control
- Once again, this was introduced prior to 4.7. This will enable Ajax for the module control. Every postback in it will be converted to an async callback.
- Control Source
- This new addition would enable you to pick a control from any specified location. You are no longer restricted to the DesktopModules and Admin folders.
Skins:
- Edit Skin Attributes
- This one is definetely a cool one. In your skins page, you can now modify the Skin Object attributes (such as CssClass for example). This allow you to quickly and easily (without calling on your HTML/CSS designer) modify minor skin nuances with a few mouse clicks.
Toolbar:
- Design button is gone!
- The design button on the toolbar was moved to the Mode section (top-left) as a radio button. There were issues with the way that this worked in the past where users thought that the data was lost!
Add Page:
- Select a Template Folder
- You can now select a different template folder. This is a good addition as it allows you to better organize your DNN file system.
Well, that's all folks! I hope this is useful.
If you know of any additional features (I am sure I missed a few) please drop me a comment below.