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We have a long history of using automation to enable teams to deliver regularly without drama. When we start a consulting relationship, one of our first steps is evaluating the process required to automate deployment of whatever we’re building for them. This process of thinking through how to simply and easily get our work out for testing and production usage pushes the team to think earlier about real value for real customers.

When one of our partners needs a software solution that’s fast, reliable, and easy to maintain, we consistently choose to build its backend upon .NET. We’ve grown to trust its enterprise-minded community to deliver solutions that meet the needs of small prototypes while maturing to support extreme workloads when necessary.

When building a website, the choice of platform to build upon is multifaceted. Traditionally, a platform supplied the visual display of content to end users as well as the editing and management of that content. However, a different approach is becoming more popular and is worth considering for most public-facing sites. This headless approach separates content management from the display of that content, allowing each tool to be optimized, creating a more performant, secure, and flexible result.

If your website is driven by dynamic content, a Content Management System (CMS) is usually a good choice. While there are a lot of viable CMS options out there today, lately we have been more interested in exploring headless options (where the backend is separated from the frontend) which turned our attention to Payload CMS. Payload comes with many advantages, especially catered to developers, giving the team a modern stack (JavaScript, React, Node.js) with a lot of control without sacrificing performance, scalability, and the ability to customize to business needs.

Many developers who try out programming in a functional programming language describe it as an “a-ha” moment and begin to look for and make opportunities to use functional languages. However, CTOs and other technical leaders often approach these languages with trepidation or dismissal. Are the benefits of functional languages truly worth the investment in increased training and costlier hiring?

When faced with building a modern website that is content-focused, Astro is an easy framework choice to make. The features and benefits of Astro make for a compelling option when balancing page performance, great SEO, reliability, and hosting cost considerations.

While we believe technology should never dictate your strategy, the reality of legacy or existing architecture often plays a major part in guiding the direction of designing cohesive software experiences. We build with intention with an aim for organizational growth, collaboration, and operational health, no matter the tech stack.

Websites are about a lot more than a beautiful design and polished branding, its main goals and strengths are communication. It’s not about how delightful an animation is or about using the most cutting edge fonts. It’s about connection, cohesion, and creating a digital space where your members, customers, or clients immediately understand who you are and what you offer.

Faith Enroll was designed to remove administrative stress and replace it with clarity, consistency, and care. It’s a streamlined enrollment platform that automates registration, payment collection, and communication so faith-based organizations can focus less on paperwork and more on purpose.

Leagues, clubs, and sports organizations don’t fail because of lack of passion. They struggle when logistics get in the way, tripping over manual registration, messy schedules, payment confusion, or last-minute communication chaos. Engage Sports is an all-in-one sports league management platform designed to keep operations tight, communication clear, and the focus where it belongs: on the game.

As a creative director, I spend a lot of time thinking about systems. Not just how they work but how they feel to use. Because whether you’re designing a brand, a website, or an association management platform, the truth is the same: if it’s clunky, people disengage, and if people disengage, growth dies very quickly.

Intuition is powerful, but insight is unstoppable. Great brands don't guess, they listen. They listen to how users move through their site, where resistance appears, what gets ignored, and what actually converts. Behind every smart decision is data composed from meaningful signals that reveal how people actually experience your brand.

Behind every seamless digital experience is an architecture you never notice, and that’s usually the point. When systems are thoughtfully designed, aligned, and optimized, they fade into the background and let your business shine. A failing infrastructure slows teams down, fractures customer experiences, and quietly can kill your growth.

Your business isn’t generic, so why should your software be? Off-the-shelf tools are designed for the average use case, often the broadest audience, the safest assumptions, and the lowest common denominator. While they might work for a few months, they eventually reveal their limits through clunky workflows, rigid systems, hidden risks, and growth bottlenecks you didn’t plan for.

Security isn’t just an IT concern, it’s a brand responsibility. We think about trust the same way we think about design: it’s invisible when done right and catastrophic when ignored. Your website, applications, and digital systems are more than just tools, they’re the front door of your business and that door needs to be reinforced.

Technology should never dictate your strategy, but rather support and express your needs. Custom software consulting isn’t about choosing tools, it’s more about shaping systems that reflect how your organization operates, collaborates, and grows. In 2026 the most successful businesses aren’t stacking software. They’re designing cohesive digital ecosystems.

Elm is a functional programming language, with a focus on the front-end of web applications. It is famous for providing a delightful developer experience, while also providing many useful constraints which allow tooling to optimize it in a variety of ways. These constraints which the language imposes are viewed as either impractical roadblocks or incredible multipliers, depending on the viewpoint of the team involved.

Open source projects come with many pros, such as cost-effectiveness, flexibility and customization, and community collaboration, but they also can run into some challenging cons like lack of dedicated support, strain on maintainers and volunteers, as well as the amount of time it takes to design, develop, and test to release changes and improvements.

What does it mean to have a great team? How to make good teams cross over into great territory? Working together is more than just doing the work.

When working within a CMS system that gives a lot of freedom, it is important to instill guardrails and best practices to keep designs and content consistent and usable. Using design and content best practices together is the key to making pages more compelling and overall effective.

At Engage, a handful of us get together once a week as a book club to read and discuss selected titles over the course of a couple months. We recently read The AI Con by Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender.

DNN Platform is a web application platform for .NET Framework which was started in late 2002 (under the name DotNetNuke). Engage has a long history of supporting and building on DNN and has created decades of connections with businesses that have built web-based solutions upon DNN. When you consider your organization’s investment in DNN, are you concerned about if you’re getting enough out of it? Let Engage’s experts help you explore what DNN is best for, what to expect from DNN in the future, and what other options you may want to consider.

On the heels of a recent string of supply chain security incidents in the JavaScript ecosystem, I thought it might be timely to look at security within the ecosystem of the Elm programming language.

Engage AMS is a suite of tools to manage events and memberships for associations and similar organizations. Its core differentiator is an architecture which encourages flexibility, allowing for both configuration and custom integrations to ensure each organization’s needs are met.

At Engage, we like to go beyond the guesswork in our approach to projects and build products that are not only functional but also intuitive, enjoyable, and genuinely useful. But how do we move beyond our own assumptions to really understand what our users need? The answer lies in the continuous practice of user research.

Over the years of delivering working software we have carefully carved a pathway to how we do our best work. Many of these habits and workflows resemble agile methodologies very closely, while others were more ideas that evolved from traditional agile approaches. Like any successful project, our approach is also expected to grow and iterate over time. The following is a representation of how we are currently working together to build software products.

We believe the best solutions come from working together. Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do, including striving for full team discovery. We value diverse perspectives and open communication to achieve the best outcomes, and by working together to plan our work, we can deliver optimal solutions through shared understanding and clarity.

At Engage, a handful of us get together once a week as a book club to read and discuss selected titles over the course of a couple months. We recently read Software Teaming by Woody Zuill and Kevin Meadows and shared our review and a few take-aways at one of our weekly Lunch & Learn sessions. Here is a transcript (lightly edited for readability) of the presentation.

We recently migrated our primary marketing website, engagesoftware.com, from DNN Platform to Astro. This post will cover the technical details of that migration.

Our primary marketing website, engagesoftware.com, has been built upon the DNN Platform for more than a decade. After redesigning the content and flow of the site at the beginning of the year, we realized that we weren’t really using much of the functionality that DNN provided. In concert with some other work to move toward static sites, we started a small project to see what would happen if we migrated off of DNN and onto Astro. This is the story of that migration.

One big benefit of DNN is its theme architecture which allows for the separation of presentation and content, giving web designers the ability to develop the structure and look and feel of the website. DNN comes with a couple of themes out of the box to get you started, however these are rarely the right fit and are generic on purpose. There are also many commercial themes, with pre-made design concepts and templates, but their “one-size-fits-all” approach often fails to deliver a good experience for a specific audience or are too off-brand.

At Engage, we’ve been making websites since forever. With the resurgence of static HTML websites, we wanted to take a stroll down memory lane and think about all of the ways HTML files have been a part of our website journey through the years.

Custom software can be the difference between a solution that’s adequate and one that’s gamechanging. The upfront investment required for custom software versus off-the-shelf solutions necessitates a clear vision for how to get the best results from the team. Working with a team that is confident in methods to find and amplify value is a shortcut to delivering excellence.

Website personalization has a huge influence on how users experience your business. Tailoring content and appearance to individual users creates unique experiences for your site visitors and can foster increased engagement, higher conversion rates, longer site visits, and a better understanding of your loyal customer base.

Every custom software initiative is different. If it’s all been done already, just buy a solution off the shelf. If it deserves the investment of custom software, it will be solving unprecedented challenges. Cookie-cutter approaches to architecture, team makeup, or delivery methods can contribute to a lower-than-hoped-for return on investment. Instead, having the whole team explore options allows an optimal solution to emerge.

Building usable software is about understanding your users' mental models and how they interact with your product. That’s where usability testing comes in. Whether you're building a new feature or redesigning an entire product, usability testing is one of the most powerful tools in a user researcher’s tool box to ensure your team is heading in the right direction.

It’s common to hear business people talk about a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) nowadays, but it’s not always clear if everyone is talking about the same thing, or if what they’re talking about is something that’s valuable and solves a real problem.

Mercenaries build whatever they’re told to build. They take orders. Their job starts and ends with executing tasks. They may be competent, but they’re not invested in the problem space or the outcome. Missionaries, on the other hand, are passionate about what they’re building. They deeply believe in the problem they’re solving. They own the outcome, not just the output.

DNN Platform is an open source web application platform with a strong security focus. Learn steps to take to ensure it stays secure over the long run.

The Elm programming language is “a delightful language for reliable web applications.” It would be used as an alternative to React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, and other web application frameworks. Elm is an opinionated, niche language and framework that is not for everyone, but those who use it often find it a defining experience that forever changes how they approach building applications.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a creative approach to problem-solving that starts with understanding the people you're designing for and ends with solutions tailored to their needs. It’s more than a buzzword, it’s a philosophy and a practical methodology that helps teams create intuitive, useful, and impactful products.

Rich Campbell, Co-Founder & President, discusses how managing expectations impacted the Account Center project with Consolidated Communications.

Anthony Overkamp, Creative Director, discusses how working with existing designs impacted the Account Center project with Consolidated Communications.

Brian Dukes, CTO, discusses how DevOps automation impacted the Account Center project with Consolidated Communications.

Associations, colleges, and even telecommunications providers often have member-facing portals which collect information from a wide variety of systems and allow those members to make changes to that information (e.g. by adding a new subscription). Ideally, all of the details of that change are immediately available to the member throughout the portal and any 3rd party they may be redirected to. For example, if their new subscription gives them access to a research platform, they expect to see a new link to that platform show up, and give them the access they paid for.

At Engage, we believe that great software isn’t just built, it’s refined. One of the key practices in our workflow is the retrospective, a dedicated time for teams to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve. But what exactly is a retrospective, and why does it matter to our teams and clients?

A business’s website is more than just an online presence, it’s a critical driver of growth, customer engagement, and brand reputation. Yet, many organizations overlook a vital component of their digital strategy: accessibility. An accessible website ensures that all users, including those with visual, auditory, cognitive, or motor impairments, can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with online content. Often viewed merely as a legal requirement, accessibility should instead be embraced as a strategic advantage that enhances inclusivity, expands audience reach, and strengthens overall impact.

Creating successful tech products is about ensuring great ideas align with real user needs. By grounding decisions in data and user insights, businesses can build products that people actually want to use– leading to higher adoption, stronger customer loyalty, and better business outcomes. Research-driven design ensures product market fit, enhances user experience, and encourages adoption. It also saves time and budget in the long term and builds brand loyalty. Understanding your goals and the problem you are trying to solve will help you choose the right research methods at each stage of development.

DevOps is an approach to creating software which works to reduce the gap between coding and deploying, allowing the same team which created the code to deploy and monitor the application, generally through automating much of that deployment and monitoring process. In order to achieve the strong outcomes associated with teams practicing DevOps, the DORA Core model highlights building capabilities in the following categories: Climate of Learning, Fast Flow, and Fast Feedback.

Software teams typically include people with a wide variety of skills, including management, software architecture, visual design, UX design, data design, and business insights. A common “money-saving” approach is to have someone with management skills work closely with customers closest to the business goals in order to decide what should be done next, and then that management person will turn those ideas into tasks that the engineers and designers implement. However, the best teams understand that using designers and engineers only for implementation is a waste of their talents, and instead create a virtuous cycle of collaboration by bringing everyone to the table.

You know your product/business better than anyone else. Working directly with your design and development team helps them to design and build specific features and functionality around your exact needs. When your business needs change, having software built upon a flexible foundation can allow your product to quickly meet the challenge, whether that’s scaling, increased security, or an entirely new integration or product line. By starting with a custom approach to your business’ software, you have full control over the direction and impact of your vision.

Released in 2002, .NET Framework introduced the world to the C# language and came to be a stable, productive foundation for many Windows-based applications, including web sites through the ASP.NET framework. A new cross-platform version of .NET (originally called .NET Core, and now just .NET) was released in 2016, which saw the lion’s share of investment from Microsoft. .NET Framework had its last major release in 2019 (version 4.8), with 4.8.1 coming in 2022. Knowing the level of attention given to the newer cross-platform .NET, why would teams in 2025 choose to start new projects using .NET Framework instead of using the newest platforms and libraries?

As part of STL TechWeek, Engage’s quality specialist Kristen Palm will be presenting Quality Assurance Testing at StartupSTL Summit on Friday, April 4, 2025. Attendees can anticipate learning about different types of testing tools and software, best practices for implementing testing plans and when to do them, as well as a brief overview of quality assurance and why it is so important. Seating is limited, and registration is required. We hope to see you there!

How can you know how long a new initiative to build a custom software product will take? What’s a reasonable amount to plan to pay to get started turning your vision into technically excellent software that can go live and start producing value? Once an estimate of the effort has been created, how close should you expect the true cost to be?

DNN Platform (open-source) 10.3.2 is the latest stable version of the DNN CMS. It was officially released on May 5, 2026. Evoq is on 9.13.10, which was released on November 3, 2025 and is based on DNN platform 9.13.9.

Finding the right software firm to help you build and maintain your systems can be quite the challenge. Typically, it is who you know. "I know a guy who does development. Let me ask him if he can help/let me ask him who he'd recommend." But, what is the right method for evaluating whether your guy's recommendation is the right fit for your company?

As software developers, it is critically important to continually update the products our customers are using. Below are the latest release notes for Engage AMS, Engage Sports, and Faith Enroll.

We’ve been patiently waiting for the next major release of DNN, and it is finally here (DNN 10.0.0 was published on April 9)! This update will be more disruptive than others in the past, as the maintainers have taken this opportunity to remove features that have been deprecated since DNN 8, going back to January 2016. In addition to clearing some accumulated clutter from years past, DNN 10 offers a number of improvements for both administrators and developers.

User experience (UX) design is a human-first approach to a user’s interaction with a product, platform, or brand. Through research, data analysis, and testing, UX designers optimize experiences to be smooth, intuitive, and efficient, allowing users to complete their tasks with minimal frustration. By helping users achieve their goals more easily, the product or brand leaves a better impression and creates more satisfaction overall.

On Sept 19th, Engage Digital Strategist, Kristen Palm, passed the GA4 Certification exam in one try with a high-flying 86%.

Engage CTO, Brian Dukes, is heading to the DNN Connect conference in Switzerland to join the panel of guest speakers.

Members of the Engage team are heading down South to attend GO! The Gulf Coast Faith Formation Conference on Jan 13-14th 2023 to learn more about other Faith-based products and to educate others on Faith Enroll.

Since acquiring SMB Creative Group in Jan 2020, the team has been super busy and has built new partnerships - Catholic Faith Technologies and Aware3. Catholic Faith Technologies: A division of Nelnet, Catholic Faith Technologies (CFT) offers solutions for online learning, faith formation, employee/volunteer onboarding and more. SMB, now under Engage, already had many religious clients.

Within your DNN site, each module has a menu for MODULE SETTINGS.  You access the module settings by going into edit mode and then on the module, hover over the gear wheel of the module and click on settings. Learn more about the different settings and what you do with them.

In order to edit existing content, you need to have editing access to the site.  That will either be an Administrator role or a specific content editor type role.  If you need editing access, you will have to reach out to your site's manager. Step 1 - Login Step 2 - Navigate to the page you want to edit, then click on the edit pencil icon in the lower left corner

DNN has the ability to assign roles to users, to create business-specific roles, and show/hide content based on those roles.  The three basic roles are Administrators, Registered Users, and Subscribers.  Administrators are your web experts who need access to the back end of things.  There is also Host/SuperUser access, which should be reserved for the website builder and expert developers.

We are going to cover Page Settings, Page Appearance and Page Permissions within DNN platform. The Licensed version, Evoq, has slightly different options, but the basics are the same. To access a page's settings, you can hover over the CONTENT icon and then click on Pages.

How do WCAG and ADA work together? And, do websites have to be ADA compliant? WCAG is the set of guidelines that websites need to follow in order to be ADA compliant. Following WCAG improves the user experience and avoids the possibility of a lawsuit. Simply put, websites need to be ADA compliant because it’s the law.

In the past year we have released several updates - some focused on small improvements and a few major changes based on client feedback. Our continuous improvement Software as a Service (SaaS) model allows us to act quickly and release updates in a timely manner. Here are some of the recent highlights: We added an unsubscribe link to emails sent through broadcast allowing members/event registrants to opt-out of receiving those communications while still allowing to receive the event-specific registration emails.

How do you add new content to a page?  DNN has two methods depending on if you are creating something from scratch or if you have a pattern that you want to mimic.   From scratch - you would choose the "ADD NEW MODULE" option Mimic a pattern - pick "ADD EXISTING MODULE" Here are the steps to do both.

At Engage Software, we are honored to be recognized year after year by Clutch.co as one of the Top Software Development agencies in the St. Louis, Missouri area.

DNN is a secure website platform, but no CMS stays secure without regular updates. A cautionary tale and what you can do to protect your website from being hacked.

In January 2020, Engage acquired SMB Creative Group, a digital marketing firm that helps small to mid-market organizations grow through online initiatives, website development, and support services. Fast-forward just shy of one year, and a new division has evolved from the marriage of the two skill sets: Engage Digital Services.

Associations everywhere have suddenly found themselves struggling to pivot their plans for their in-person, live events into digital experiences on platforms like Zoom.

We are thankful that we have the resources and the technology to do our work remotely and that our clients will not be affected.  All projects will continue as planned.

Engage is excited to announce that we have acquired SMB Creative Group and its Connecting Members platform. Additionally SMB Creative’s entire team will join the team at Engage. Welcome SMB Creative Group to the Engage Software family!

With our work with associations, we have honed in on and become experts as to what makes a visually-appealing, user-friendly association website. Part of becoming experts means teaming up with other experts to bring you our shared knowledge.  This is why we created the Association Best Practices webinar series.  Our first series launched in 2017 and we have just launched the next round for 2019 and going into 2020. We hope you can join us for these free, educational opportunities.

Engage is honored with a Top Website Developers badge by Clutch.co for 2019. This recognition means a lot to the software developers at Engage since it shows off their hardwork and expertise in the .Net development realm.

Engage AMS continues to improve with releases 7.13, 7.14, and 7.1. The system can now check for duplicate memberships, auto-approve applications, support one person holding multiple membership types, and allow for company-based memberships instead of only individual memberships.

Want to attract more members? Associations should take a cue from the consumer world and adapt their membership to a “made-to-order” model.

Engage Software commemorates 20 years of growth, innovation and leadership.

YAY! You just got a new member! Hopefully, she’ll acclimate and find her place and stay with you forever.

Wes Trochlil, president of association consulting firm, Effective Data Management, shares that data is an essential asset for any association. It’s what drives member engagement, increases member retention, creates additional revenue, and enhances marketing efforts. He notes that most associations are doing a better job than they think they are at managing data; however, there is always room for improvement.

The Engage team just got back from attending DNN Summit 2019.  Our Creative Director, Anthony Overkamp, lead the theme session during the day of training, and I presented three sessions during the conference.

Engage offers a primer on sharing DNN modules.

Web design experts, Brian Dukes and Anthony Overkamp, lead sessions from theming, to building secure ASP.NET applications at DNN Summit 2019.

Engage Software earned a spot in the Clutch.co top 1,000 B2B companies from around the world!

DNN co-founder, Joe Brinkman, joins the development team at Engage Software. In addition to working with our clients, Joe will also help bring two new Engage products to market in 2019.

Engage Software’s Jason Stone recaps the association trends and technology discussed at AMS Fest - Fall 2018, Washington D.C.

Learn the four things that will help you focus your efforts when choosing a CMS platform.

"I Don’t Know What an AMS is and at this Point, I’m too Afraid to Ask." Association TRENDS fields the question: "What is an AMS?"

Five Layers of Building a Positive UX How do you ensure that your association’s website is providing a positive experience? The following article walks through five steps to building a site with an effective UX.

Amanda Kaiser provides 5 tips when researching your next association management software.

Engage Software explores using the process of Design Thinking to create an association website with a positive user experience.

One of the benefits of working within the DNN content management platform is the wide range of solutions that are available to you for any given issue. It's this flexibility that allows administrators at any level to handle site management, content editing, and even styling with ease. Styling will be the focus of this tutorial: specifically, the options you have for adding custom styles to your DNN site.

Engage Software’s Jason Stone shares tips on how associations can improve online member engagement.

Engage Software’s Jason Stone recaps the association trends and technology discussed at AMS Fest- Summer 2018.

Engage discusses options for associations to integrate their AMS and website for a better member experience.

Engage Software creates a culture to maximize creativity, flexibility, and freedom.

19th Anniversary celebration: continued growth in our client-base, skillset, product offerings, and partnerships.

Engage discusses the upcoming GDPR deadline and tools to ensure a compliant digital presence.

Engage continues its growth and introduces new project manager and software developer to its team of experts.

In April of 2018, Engage earned the right to join the Progress Partner+ program with Sitefinity. We demonstrated our expertise with Progress Sitefinity and now can offer this platform as another tool for marketing analytics.

Engage is excited to announce our recent inclusion in Clutch.co’s research as a top website designer and developer in St. Louis. Clutch.co is a Washington DC-based ratings and reviews site that shows distinguished companies in different fields. For each firm on the site, there is an intensive research process, which examines over a dozen unique factors. Chief among these factors are Clutch’s conversations with clients. In interview-style phone calls, clients delve into the services offered, results of the engagement, and the project management of the firm.

A number of us from Engage attended DNN Summit last month in Denver. It was a great opportunity to strengthen our relationships within the DNN ecosystem, share our DNN and development expertise, and get a better understanding of the state of the community. This post provides links and summaries of the sessions I presented at the conference.

For most associations and non-profits, your website is an essential tool for managing, connecting, and communicating with your members, and it is often the first point of contact for those first discovering your organization. Crucial to establishing a positive first impression and maintaining ongoing relationships, your website must provide a user-friendly, engaging platform for readers to communicate and learn. If you are looking to design a new website or update your existing one, be sure to include targeted questions in your request for proposal (RFP) that will connect you with the best fit for your organization. One of the first and most crucial factors to consider for project success is a potential agency’s proven industry expertise. 

Like a new car, a website starts to decay and lose value the day it launches. While it is a best practice strategy to have a maintenance plan in place for keeping it up to date, most companies do not have the time or resources, causing them to wait until their site is not meeting their needs before revisiting its design and functionality. So, how do you know when it’s time to update your website?

Choosing a website design firm is a critical decision. You're not just buying a professional service and putting a project in the provider’s hands, you're entrusting your association to them. In doing so, it is essential to select the right firm to partner with to ensure your association’s success.

Lynn Campbell and I have just returned from our Engage AMS product launch at ASAE Tech. This is my second year attending the conference, and I must say I liked it better this time around. I attend the conference to meet with prospects and fellow vendors alike, but I found the thought leadership in presentations to be equally valuable (when I could sneak away from our booth to attend them).

Over the past three years, approximately 60 percent of our clients have been in the association space. It became clear that, especially for small-staff associations, there was a need for an AMS (Association Management System) that was accessible, scalable and customizable to fit their specific business needs. Given the success of our AMS website integrations and our Engage Sports registration system it was a natural progression for us to develop Engage AMS to meet this growing need.

In June we made note of an issue with Telerik components affecting DNN users. Please be aware of a subsequent bulletin issued by DNN affecting all versions of DNN and Evoq from 5.6.3 to 9.1.1.

Choosing association-management software (AMS) can be a challenge. To narrow down the options, first decide between a proprietary AMS (built entirely by a single vendor) and one built on top of another application or platform, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce.

DNN Software's security team has discovered a vulnerability in a set of 3rd party components that are used in DNN. This post includes information for sites on DNN Platform (open source) and DNN Evoq (Content Basic, Content and Engage) v 7.1.2 and higher.

Inspired by an AMSfest Chicago 2017 Block & Tackle session on 3rd party integrations, here are 5 things associations (and businesses, too) should keep in mind for a successful 3rd party integrations to your core software.

We are proud to share that we are now a Silver Certified agency partner with SharpSpring, a leading provider of marketing automation solutions designed to help companies generate more leads, drive sales and optimize spend. Notably, we are the only Silver-Level partner in the St. Louis, Missouri market.

One of the main sources of revenue for nonprofit organizations, as well as some government agencies is events. With so much riding on each event, it is important that your organization’s event registration system is robust enough to handle not only the volume of events you host, but makes the attendee experience as easy as possible – from finding the event on your website and registering to attending the event and providing you with valuable feedback after the event.

Join Engage at the Midwest Digital Marketing Conference (MDMC17). We're sponsoring the 2-day St. Louis event April 12 & 13. After attending the one-day event last year, we knew this year's two-day event would be even better so we're also sponsoring! Come to the conference and stop by our table and say hello. This year's theme is "Rise of the Digital Native." Learn from top speakers from around the Midwest on all things Digital Marketing. Register to attend on the event website.

On April 20, join Lindsay Matush and Jason Stone to learn about marketing for Associations. This will be the sixth webinar in our Association Best Practice Series.

We just returned from DNN Summit 2017, where I gave two presentations (I also helped coordinate the Code-a-Thon, and my colleague Anthony Overkamp gave one presentation and led a full day of theme training). I wanted to put together a quick post to let people know where to access the materials from my presentations.

Planning web development that's to occur in the 4th quarter can be a tricky proposition. It pays to be informed on the potential hurdles you could face with your web development firm.

In a recent DNN Community Blog post entitled, "DNN 9 and the Future of the DNN Platform," DNN VP Technology & Community Relations, Joe Brinkman, shared that DNN 9 is en route and due for delivery by the end of 2016. True to his word, DNN 9 is here.

At Engage, we've been excited to embrace a new technology for creating web applications that are more maintainable, performant, and reliable. Elm is a programming language that compiles to JavaScript, designed from the ground up for creating web applications, in a way that guides developers towards well-architected code, which we've been excited to explore and have now officially decided to adopt as our primary front-end development language.

I've written about the high level benefits of using the Elm language, this post deals with the developer experience of using Elm.

Ideal for anyone who manages, directs or collaborates on an association website, our Association Best Practice Webinar Series will provide expert advice for engaging members, delivering positive user experiences and much more.

TL;DR Install the Security Analyzer module if your DNN website is on a version below 7.4.1 (starting in 7.4.1 this module is included within DNN itself). If you're on DNN 8, make sure you've upgraded to 8.0.3.

Engage's latest trip to Washington D.C. was a well worthwhile as client after client racked up Protech Fusion Wow! Awards.

When redesigning an association website, it is wise to seek user experience resources and data. User experience (or UX) is the crossroads of design, functionality, and site visitor interaction. It’s not just about striking images or clear navigation. It’s the takeaway “feeling” a person has after visiting and using your website. Its psychological and physical.

We are thrilled to announce that our client, the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), is a winner of a 2016 Gold Circle Award from the Center for Association Leadership (ASAE) in the website category!

The importance of culture is sometimes hard to explain, especially when you’re small; but it becomes quite obvious once you start to grow. Culture can change quickly; it only takes a few team members that do not fit the model to create a cultural change that quickly spreads. Culture has to be nurtured, and as a team we need to be relentless about hiring designers and developers that strengthen our culture and avoid those that don’t. Take a look at a few characteristics of people we look for at Engage and why:

Jason Stone shares his thoughts on DNNcon 2016 as well as his presentation on using Google Analytics to help get the most out of your web redesign project.

DNNCon has come and gone again and it was a great success. I met a lot of great individuals and caught up with some old friends. This conference marks my first time speaking at a conference, and I think that it went fairly well. You can find the links to my slide deck and example code inside.

Providing a better user experience (UX) is not just about making the site speedy or visually appealing – it is about making the site more enjoyable to use in order to drive conversations with consumers and promote your brand. As we begin a new year, many of the web design and development trends we see revolve around UX – from more effectively curating content, to making interactions clear and accessible to sprinkling in subtle animations. In no particular order, here are the top trends for 2016.

The organizers of DNNCon have announced they are going to be holding the conference in Baltimore, MD. The event will take place on April 1-2, 2016. Here at Engage, we are very excited -- this will be the first DNNCon since November 2014.

Whether you’re looking for a complete website overhaul, a migration to a new content management system, or just revamping your design, your budget can be just as important to you as the final product. And, when dollars are the top priority, you’ll undoubtedly want your web development firm to provide you with an accurate estimate up front. Unfortunately, sometimes that’s just not feasible.

Business Logic in Dynamics CRM 2015 gives us the ability to do many things that previously required a good understanding of javascript.  In this blog post, I'm going to show you step by step how to change the ownership of a record based on certain conditions.

Do you ever look at a view and wish you could tweak it just a little to get exactly the data you want to see?  In this blog post, I’m going to walk you through creating an advanced find that you can then save as a custom view.

In this blog post I'll explore a very real scenario where a plugin was broken after a recent update to Dynamics CRM 2015.  We will dive into the code and update the plugin to work with the latest SDK and actually deploy the plugin back to CRM.  

While many inherent challenges come with developing and designing a website, some surface time and time again -- for associations in particular. Here are the 5 most common challenges in a website project and a look at how to overcome them.

Since the release of Update 1 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015, you are now able to create a basic theme for your CRM instance.  In this blog post, I'll show you step by step how you can create a theme that matches your companies color scheme.

Over here at the Engage Headquarters, we recently have been excitedly discussing ASP.NET vNext, or as it is now called, ASP.NET 5 and the changes that will follow. This is a fair warning before reading on, this article is from more of a technical perspective than anything else.

Adding a report to a dashboard in Dynamics CRM online 2015 can be a little more difficult than it seems.  In this blog post, I'll show you how to work around a common error I see when people try to add a report.  

If you're like me, and get most current events via your Twitter feed or have spent some time looking up hilarious memes on Google Images, then you’ve experienced infinite scrolling—a web design technique in which content continually loads as a user scrolls down the page. Infinite scrolling is most commonly utilized on social networking sites such as Twitter and Tumblr, and websites like ESPN.com, where the ability to quickly scan information is a major component of the user experience.

A review of the latest report from BuiltWith®, the popular website profiler, reveals that the greatest migration of CMSs to the DNN platform is from Joomla to DNN, which may explain why you are reading this blog post. The answer to the question "How do I migrate from Joomla DNN" -- as is the case with most good questions -- is "It depends."

Here we are at the mid-point of 2015, and what a whirlwind of a year it has been thus far. Over the past couple of months, we’ve added several new clients and even introduced Microsoft Dynamics CRM development to our repertoire. Of course, more clients and more services mean more work. And, more work means growing our staff. 

Engage is looking for both a Front-end Web Developer and a Software Developer. For more information, please visit our careers page.

If you read our white paper, "Taking a Responsive Approach: Responsive Web Design in the DNN CMS," you probably already know that Google has sung the praises of responsive design, claiming it to be its "preferred site configuration." But, did you know that you can use Google Analytics to gain insight on your need for a responsive site? Follow these steps, and you’ll be able to tell if you should spend more attention to better serving your small-screen audience through responsive design.

In an albeit quiet, but official announcement Microsoft has shared that "SharePoint Online Public Website" is no longer available. New customers who subscribe to Office 365 won't have access to it. Old customers have less than 2 years to migrate to another platform.

Website’s improved accessibility, streamlined content management, and integration with association management software is helping the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) better serve members

In the perfect pairing of two worlds we do business in - franchising and associations - we had the pleasure of attending the International Franchise Association’s #IFA2015 Convention, and it was a great conference!

Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD) to enhance user experience, drive site traffic and increase visitor engagement with DNN’s Evoq™ Engage Social Online Community Solution.

DNN's Evoq 8 is now out and it will change the way you see the platform.

I've written a post about using JavaScript Libraries in DNN on the DNN community blog. We're excited about what it will look like for the community to start making use of this feature of the DNN Platform. Check it out!

Finding odd domains traffic in your Google Analytics or getting unusual, no time on site, one-page, high bounce traffic? That's likely bot traffic. Here's a simple tip from Google on how to hide that annoying data.

A couple of weeks ago, Engage shut down our offices for a day so that everyone in the company could work on making DNN better. The primary component that we wanted to focus on was the rich text editor, specifically making some investments in the CKEditor provider, so that it can replace the Telerik RadEditor provider (the community had already decided to migrate to the CKEditor for a number of reasons, so we wanted to ensure that we were migrating to something that we would want to use). I wanted to give a quick rundown of what we accomplished and what's next for the CKEditor in DNN.

Though your website may look great and house infinite amounts of information about your association, are you really maximizing its potential? Here are some best practices that today's most forward-thinking associations and nonprofits are employing to improve their websites and offer the best-possible member experience.

Engage is hosting a hackathon in our St. Louis office to work together to better the DNN Platform.

The Engage team recently got back from attending DNNCon 2014 in West Palm Beach, Florida. As this was my first time attending DNNCon, I did not know what to expect. I liked what I found there...

DNN 7.5, Evoq 8.0, Evoq Social 3.0 are coming in early 2015. Time to feel the "energization!"

A number of big changes have been going on in both the DNN and Microsoft communities.  I provide a run-down on my blog at https://weblogs.asp.net/briandukes/changes-everywhere-we-look

Protech Fusion is a chance to meet several happy Engage association clients face-to-face and all at once. I love that.

Last week, a few of Engage’s finest (Jason Stone, vice president, marketing and sales; Kevin O’Brien, co-founder and vice president, operations; and Kayle McLean, project manager) made their way to Washington, D.C., for Fusion 2014, Protech Associates’ annual customer conference. As a company, we were thrilled to return to the conference for a second consecutive year, this time as a Fusion Premier sponsor.

At Engage we believe in investing in the professional development of our employees. While building professionals who can effectively communicate with our customers has always been a priority for us, we also stress a healthy work-life balance.

2014 is shaping up to be a banner year for us. In an age where 90% of tech start-ups fold within their first five years of existence, we celebrated our 15th anniversary last month – May 26, to be exact. Over time, our company has grown from a consulting firm, to a leader in the DNN community, and now a full-service web development firm that serves a diverse set of organizations.  

Nothing is more frustrating than trying to read a company’s Web site on your phone and having to scroll up and down, zoom in and out, and strain your eyes until you find the right information–especially when you’re in a hurry.

DNN CMS inherently offers a great base for optimizing your site for search engines once you have an understanding of where the priorities of SEO lie.

Engage welcomes two new employees to our team. Meet Kayle McLean, Project Manager and Joe Lissner, Web Developer...

In 2008, Engage released our first commercial module, Engage: Publish, to a wonderful reception from the DNN community. Soon after, Engage created several more top-selling modules – committing nearly 7,000 man hours to their development. We were very successful at creating solutions that met system integrators’ needs and, hopefully, exceeded their expectations.

Mobile First Responsive Web Design is a combination of philosophies and strategies that focus first on mobile devices, as well as user accessibility when creating a design. Websites and digital applications are getting more and more complex, and with that change, designers need to create experiences that work across the entire array of digital devices out there in the wild.

We understand not everyone could make the trip to West Palm Beach, but for those of you who couldn't make it, we wish you could have -- organizers and sponsors of the event pulled out all the stops. 

The Engage team just got back from attending DNNCon, where I gave two presentations, Creating URL Providers for Your Custom Extensions and Contributing to Open Source Projects on GitHub and CodePlex.  Jason Stone also presented Enterprise Social Networking - A Primer.

Working at Engage means being part of a team of talented, passionate individuals who love what they do and bring that spirit to work everyday. We work hard… and play hard. We value and acknowledge everyone’s contributions with an uncompromising focus on our culture as well as competitive pay and great benefits. Engage is looking for a Software Developer who will be responsible for leading all technical aspects of client website implementations. This position is responsible for designing and building tools and systems to streamline implementations of clients on a daily basis. For more information, please visit our careers page.

I'll be speaking at DNNCon in October, but maybe you should've been.  A call for more diversity in the DNN community...

Introducing Evoq Social from DNN. Your time is valuable, so why read about the power of Evoq Social when you can watch? Here's a quick (2:45) video from DNN Software that hits the highlights of why you should take a closer look at DNN's Evoq Social.

When we talk about DNN's core strengths, we frequently point to its extensibility, flexibility, and scalabity. Now that DNN has introduced an Azure-hosted solution in Evoq in the Cloud we can add redundancy and reliability to our list of reasons to love the platform.

Today DotNetNuke has undergone a dramatic and long-awaited brand relaunch. DotNetNuke is now a thing of the past, enter DNN Platform, Evoq Content and Evoq Social. DNN Corporation Co-Founder and CTO, Shaun Walker, shares his insights.

At Engage Software, we are often asked about DNN upgrades, so I thought I would write out how to do a simple DNN upgrade as well as provide guidance on the suggested DNN upgrade path.

For I ♥ DNN, we wanted to bring the barrier to entry very, very low, so that anyone could join the conversation simply and easily, without having to create yet another website account. To that end, we wanted to allow folks to sign in with their existing social network logins: Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Since these are provided with DNN, we assumed it would be fairly simple to achieve our vision. However, we ran into a handful of obstacles that we worked to overcome in implementing the core social login providers, ultimately copying and extending them to better meet our needs.

How do you migrate a large, static HTML site to DotNetNuke? NACADA asked Engage that very question and we were happy to oblige them with an answer.

The folks at DNN Social competitor NewsGator have released the results of a survey of 200 of their existing clients at Fortune 1000 companies. The results, while biased, are intriguing.

The Southern Fried Day of DotNetNuke was a very well put-together conference hosted by QCDUG in Charlotte, NC.  I spoke for a couple of sessions, and enjoyed the time with the community, seeing what others are doing with DNN, and enjoying some great southern hospitality.

Brian Dukes and I have returned, fully recovered from the clanging of cowbells, shouts of "yee-haw!" and shots of moonshine from yet another successful Day of DNN, Charlotte's Southern Fried DNN weekend.

CHADD approached Engage with a simple question about our DNN training programs and wound up with a long-term development partner. We have worked closely with CHADD to relaunch an aging website that had become too cumbersome and dated for its members to use effectively. If the increase in traffic is any indication, the new site is a hit. Congratulations CHADD!

Partners and past attendees to DotNetNuke Worlds were sent a note recently announcing the next DNN World has been slightly postponed. We've been assured this is good news, and that the 2014 event "will be nothing short of stellar and worth waiting for." In the interim, Engage is proud to be a Gold Sponsor of the upcoming Southern Fried DNN event in Charlotte, NC, April 12-13, 2013.  

Companies pay substantial license fees to use Enterprise 2.0 software, building their own communities on platforms like Jive, Yammer, Telligent and Mango Apps, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that DotNetNuke, the leading ASP.NET CMS has made a foray into social business software -- a $1 billion arena.

At Engage, we've really enjoyed using DDR menu for our skins.  It gives us a lot more control than we had before with the DNN menu (or SolPart before it).  One of the great features that we enjoyed was the ability to define a menu template using the Razor template language.  This gives us full access to C# code within the menu template, making it simple to do whatever we want the menu to do.  However, we ran into a snag when we started trying to update our sites to DNN 7.

There is an urban legend about a Harvard (or sometimes Yale) study that showed 3% of grads outperformed the remaining 97% combined by simply writing down their goals. The study is a myth, but even if the value only lies in the simple exercise of thinking about what you want from the year ahead, that's enough for us. Here's some of what we're looking to get out of 2013.

It’s official. The new Little Caesars web and mobile site is now live at www.littlecaesars.com.

This year’s winner of the CMS Critic People’s Choice Award for Best CMS for Small to Midsize Business is... DotNetNuke!

VisitYellowstoneCountry.com was suffering under the weight of an older design, broken data feeds, and technological limitations that were preventing the site from living up to user expectations. Engage created an entirely new site, and brought home some bling from DNN World as a result.

Engage is a top-tier technology firm. Though we're among the very best DotNetNuke developers in the world, our passion doesn't end at coding. We love being partners to our clients. We love to think alongside them about getting the best results from their projects. We love calling on our past experiences as marketers, business owners and ad agency creatives. And sometimes for all our efforts and all our energy we get emails like this one... 

In case you missed it all, Engage launched our iheartdnn campaign for the DNN World 2012 Conference. iheartdnn captures the Engage brand beautifully. We’re all about DNN. DotNetNuke is the only CMS Engage works with. If you're looking for an enterprise-level, DNN-centric development team, we're the guys. Simple as that.

I just got back from presenting at DNN World 2012.  It was a good time to see all of the folks in the DNN community who love DNN and are working to move it forward.  DNN 7 is shaping up to be a wonderful major release with some well thought-out user experience changes, some great professional features, and developer productivity features, and the introduction of the forth-coming Nebula product is one to keep an eye on. I started off the conference by presenting on developing functionality using the Knockout JavaScript library. I've embedded the presentation below, and used some demos which are now hosted on jsfiddle: Demo 1, Demo 2, Demo 3, Demo 4, Demo 5 Responsive Views with Knockout from Engage Software In addition to presenting, I was able to walk away from the conference with a couple of awards. I was presented with one of ten DotNetNuke MVP awards for community contributions, which was very special. I've heard the sentiment from a few others, but it really is humbling and surprising to stand on the stage with folks whose work and dedication you respect. I don't see myself belonging with that group, but I'm pleased that the kind folks at DNN Corporation have a different view of it. I'm excited to see who joins the MVP ranks in the spring (they indicated that there will be MVPs names twice a year), as there are still quite a few folks who really deserve the title. So, in addition to that award, I was able to get up on the stage again (with the rest of the crew from Engage) to help accept the Site-of-the-Year award (non-profit category) for Visit Yellowstone. This site was a lot of work, and we're really proud of how it came together. It's great to be recognized for that work. We were also really proud of Clint for winning the DNN SuperFan award (as well as being a fellow MVP). We were all rooting for him at the office; he is, without a doubt, the biggest, most active and genuine fan of DotNetNuke that I know. Overall, the conference was a really enjoyable and gratifying experience that we're looking forward to for next year.

Join the Engage team at this year's DotNetNuke World 2012 in Orlando. Come enjoy sessions packed with tips and techniques from DotNetNuke core team members, community members, and industry experts. In case you missed our pre-conference emails, here is a summary of what we're up to...

By sheer coincidence Google released "hot off the press" results from a new research study yesterday, the same day we announced our successful launch of True Value's mobile project. The study covered what users really want from mobile sites and concluded today's users want and demand mobile-friendly sites. Engage is happy to oblige.

In the next chapter of the True Value Company's DotNetNuke (DNN) success story, all stores on their TruSite platform now have mobile sites. With the introduction of mobile device detection in the DNN 6.1 release and with the explosion of the mobile web, the time was right for True Value to offer a mobile solution to its members. Engage was happy to take that solution from timely idea to tangible reality.

True Value Company, one of the world's largest retailer-owned hardware cooperatives, has built an agile business platform for its network of thousands of individual stores using DotNetNuke® as a foundation. Leveraging DotNetNuke and an easy-to-use site management front-end built by Engage Software, each local store owner can instantly provision and update a customized website tailored to meet the needs of that store, while taking advantage of national marketing efforts and content. More than 3,000 individual store websites are now running on a single instance of DotNetNuke, making the job of coordinating branding, product information, seasonal content and marketing promotions simple and effective for True Value's central marketing team.

This year's Day of DotNetNuke in Charlotte, NC was my second time presenting at the event, and overall I think it was a success. It was a great event as always, with plenty of knowledge, appreciation, and laughs shared. The DNN Core members, sponsors, and of course the guys at Queen City User Group really pulled it off.

Move over Zuckerberg, every DotNetNuke client now has the power to take their site social.

Join Brian, Jason, Oliver, and myself for this year's FREE Day of DotNetNuke in beautiful Charlotte, NC. Enjoy a full day of sessions packed with tips and techniques from DotNetNuke core team members, community members, and industry experts. This year's theme is "DotNetNuke Goes Social," and many of the session tracks will focus on the features of the latest release of the DotNetNuke application, version 6.2.

A productive trip to DNN World in Orlando left us ready for a big 2012... 

We’re on the plane flying back to St. Louis from DNN World 2011. I gave a presentation titled DNN 6 UI/UX Patterns, discussing the form patterns introduced in the administrative modules in DNN 6 (the new look and feel that you immediately noticed after logging into your new DNN 6 site).  Many folks asked about seeing the examples that I presented, and they are available as a repository on github, at https://github.com/bdukes/DNN-World-Demos.  This includes a series of small, one-control modules that demonstrate the various parts and pieces introduced in DNN 6.  I’ve also placed the slide deck on SlideShare, (though the vast majority of the content was just demonstration, don’t be expecting a wealth of information there).  Feel free to let me know if you have any questions, and I’ll do my best to give clarifications.

We’ve just released an update to our popular survey and form building module, Engage: Survey...

Camp Quality serves children with cancer and their families by providing year-round programs, experiences, and companionship, at no cost. Camp Quality promotes hope and inspiration while helping children foster life skills and develop their full potential. We felt like kids heading to camp each day working with Camp Quality - excited, inspired, giddy. Providing Camp Quality with a web site that reflects the experience they provided to campers was a true joy.

Engage is proud to announce we have earned the Gold Certified status within the DotNetNuke Partner program. We have been an active supporter of the DNN project for many years with the DotNetNuke Benefactor and Sponsor programs. Engage has also been a DotNetNuke Partner since the program was announced.

In case you missed it earlier this month, we released our second skin bundle - Engage Skins Collection II, which includes these six great skins, now available for one low price: Engage: Element Engage: Pure Engage: Fresh Engage: Serene Engage: Prototype Engage: Nebula

Free DNN Training! Engage is now offering free DotNetNuke Video Training through the end of February. To access the training, go to Engage University and register for a free account. If you already have an account, just login. Then access the free training here: http://www.engageuniversity.com/Courses.aspx#free Why Free? Why Now?

We recently published an update to our jobs listing module, Engage: Employment.  With version 1.9, we’ve focused on the administration of the module, and worked to help you analyze your jobs’ applicants more quickly and easily.

Earlier last week we released Engage: Nebula, a DotNetNuke 5 skin package. The skin is developed using CSS and designed around deep, dark color palettes, balanced space. The design is inspired by Star Wars: the Clone Wars, working off of the arts deep colors and stylized high contrast. The skin comes with 6 different color options, four layouts, and 6 containers. Each layout is carefully spaced to give the site even weight and balance, and when combined with the multiple containers, give your content a clear and custom way to shine. The skin package includes the original Photoshop file for easy customization, 6 unique colors, 4 layouts, and 6 containers. The force is strong with this one!

In case you might of missed it, earlier this week we released Engage: Prototype, a new DotNetNuke 5 skin package. The skin is developed using CSS and minimal images for better performance, and comes with six different color options, four layouts, and seven containers. Each layout is carefully spaced to give the site even weight and balance, and when combined with the multiple containers, give your content a clear and custom way to shine. The skin package also includes the original Photoshop file for easy customization.

Saturday, October 2nd was the Day of DotNetNuke in Chicago. A number of us from Engage attended and spoke.

I’m really excited to finally be able to introduce version 1.4 of Engage: Events.  This release addresses, in my opinion, the biggest missing feature of the module, event categorization.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a cross-functional discipline and to achieve findable websites, a variety of tactics must be employed. When building DotNetNuke (DNN) websites, optimizing your websites for findability can be exceptionally challenging. Rich, contextual content is the root of findability, but due to the nature of a content management system (CMS), content can have many disparate sources and control of your content can be unwieldy. In this article, I’ll list 12 tactics to make maintaining the fundamentals of findability in DNN easier.

In 2010, True Value and Engage launched a new, enhanced TruSite platform usingDotNetNuke (DNN). The project had a simple guiding principle – maintain consistent brand standards while allowing retailers to make their site personal. By leveraging a number of features inherent to DNN and extending the platform, True Value is able to provide retailers the tools to create and manage their own feature-rich content. Additionally, the True Value marketing department is able to provide a robust set of starter content to ensure brand standards and keep content current and relevant for all retailers.

The CodePlex Foundation enables the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities. That’s HOT. When CodePlex Foundation asked us to help enhance the features and design of their website we were giddy. Not only did this project allow us to do some exciting work, but we jumped at the chance to work with an organization whose mission we could get behind. As the branding changed and the site grew, the foundation's website easily adapted. The skinning features of DNN allowed us to completely redesign the website without losing content. As more galleries and projects became a part of the foundation, the website easily welcomed the new content. Additionally, each gallery and project owner now has the ability to manage their information. The leadership at the foundation is frequently providing news, announcements, and blogs on their website.

Engage: Serene is our latest DotNetNuke 5 skin, whose design is based on simplicity, clean white space, and balance. The skin is designed using CSS and minimal images for the best performance, and comes with 6 different color options, four layouts, and 6 containers. Each layout is carefully spaced to give the site even weight and balance, and when combined with the multiple containers, gives your content a clear and custom way to shine. The skin package includes the original Photoshop file for easy customization, 6 unique colors, 4 layouts, and 6 containers.

Engage: Fresh Engage: Fresh is a new DotNetNuke 5 skin that emphasizes simplicity and flexibility. The skin is designed using CSS and minimal images for performance, and comes in 12 different colors. The skin package comes with the Photoshop design file for easy customization, 12 unique colors, and 7 containers. Fresh is designed to be so flexible that it could be applied to any website for a fresh, clean look.

I really wanted the title of this blog post to be “Customizing the Telerik Rad Editor with DNN to Reinforce Consistent Content Administration Practices for your Content Editors and Other Implications of using Telerik Rad Editor as your Default HTML Editor in DNN” but that may have been a tad too long. In DotNetNuke 5.4.0, the community edition of the platform included the Telerik RAD Editor. This is an exciting new development for the community edition of DNN. The flexibility of the HTML editor in DNN is one of the most commonly overlooked features. For most content editors, the HTML editor might be their only interaction with the system. For this reason, customizing the HTML editor for your content administrators is crucial to user adoption and creating a friendly workspace for your editors. This blog entry is going to apply some of the same concepts from a previous blog entry for the FCKEditor, Optimizing the FCKEditor for DNN, but as an evaluation of the Telerik RAD Editor for DNN. Chris Hammond introduced how to include these features on your site in a blog on DNN Daily. I’m going to build upon his implementation instruction with some opinionated configuration recommendations.

Over the past few years, Engage has done a lot in the DotNetNuke Training space. Some highlights include: launching a DNN training program from scratch developing a great training DNN curriculum partnering with DotNetNuke Corp. to become an Official DotNetNuke Training Provider training hundreds of individuals and many groups of people at major corporations, government entities and learning institutions around the world creating alternative learning channels with live and on-demand webinars, DVD video training, and e-Learning formats This time and effort has been both exciting and challenging. Our biggest challenge has been reaching everyone who needs instructor-led DNN Training. Today we are pleased to announce the next chapter in our DotNetNuke Training adventure. Engage has again partnered with DotNetNuke Corp., this time to help launch a major initiative: the DotNetNuke Training program.

We recently released a new version of Engage: Rotator which featured four new templates to display rotating content on your DotNetNuke site.

Engage: Element is our latest commercial skin package release, including five bold color combinations, six unique containers, and three main layouts. Each layout choice comes with multiple panes designed to make your content shine whether you use all the panes together or just a few per page. Engage: Element is using the web standards approach, each layout is built with XHTML/CSS with some CSS3 enhancements (sorry IE users, you will not see text shadows). The skin itself has been cross-browser tested across most popular browsers. This skin is made to be flexible, easily accommodating any site small or large.

With the advent of 2010, we at Engage took some time to reevaluate our products business (Engage Modules and Engage Skins).  The last six months or so of 2009, we were swamped with client work and were unable to make any substantial enhancements or fixes to our DotNetNuke modules.  We recognized that this was unacceptable, and have been working to restructure our business and commitments so that we can maintain a consistent support, maintenance, and enhancements for all of our products.  As a result, we've made some internal changes to make sure that work on our product lines cannot be ignored because of client work, however pressing it may seem.

We decided to help spread the love to the DNN community by offering Engage: Zeen; a free skin package based on a Wordpress theme design created by WeFunction Design Agency especially for Smashing Magazine and their readers (Check it out). The theme was released free under a GPL, and open to modification and use for all types of projects without any restrictions. All they asked for in return was a link to the article to spread the word. The design simply rocks, and grew to be a popular favorite among Wordpress themes.

Engage launched Engage University last year as an e-Learning resource for DotNetNuke. The site is built on DNN of course, and powered by our Engage: Campus LMS. Our first course Introduction to DotNetNuke was a free, short course to provide an overview of what DNN is and how it can be applied. The course also serves as an example for how Engage: Campus works, and more importantly, what students will get in an e-Learning experience for DotNetNuke. During the past 10 months, over 350 students have taken the free Introductory course.

Actually we've always served Europe, and customers around the world. I am fortunate enough to get to travel to The Netherlands this weekend, and it even gets to be work related! I'm heading to the One Day SDN event on 12/14/2009 in Houten, The Netherlands. I will be delivering three presentations on Monday, (read the full blog post for all the info)    

This was my second time in a row to have the honor of presenting my knowledge about the most widely adopted .NET framework called DotNetNuke. One of the most appealing reasons for me to devote my time to help build a better open-source framework like DotNetNuke is the wonderful community. I had to admit, I have never involved in using too many frameworks out there closely so I can't tell how great their communities are. But one thing I can assure you that DotNetNuke has a very intimate community that pretty much everyone knows each other and have used each other products. Paul Scarlett is one of the regulars in the community I ran into this year and he commented "I came to this conference because of the people". Paul is not the only one who has this kind of feeling. I am one of them as well. I came to the conference not just to share my knowledge to the community, but to meet and greet people I've worked with through the phone, e-mail, messenger... and any other mean of communication you can think of but I've never gotten to meet them in person. And this conference is just a perfect opportunity to finally interact in person.

So things are running smoothly so far at OpenForce here in Las Vegas. The Engage guys are all enjoying their time. Ian and Dang had one of the first sessions of the event this morning, and finished that up like champs. We handed out T-Shirts after the session, though people are requesting our hunter orange shirts from last year. We’ve got some red/maroon shirts this year, sorry to disappoint.

DotNetNuke 5.2 (now in beta) introduces a new feature which allows a developer to quickly and easily create a simple DotNetNuke module. This blog post will give you a first look at this new feature and explain its usage.

Why We Do What We Do

Engage: Direct is yet another design introduced for performance and variation. The skin design comes with three main layouts in five different colors choices. I designed the skin to accommodate large amounts of copy, with detail to the vertical scroll. The color options bring a casual feel to the site, and helps frame in the content being displayed. Engage: Direct uses subtle gradients, and soft color to give the overall site a warm, casual look and feel. This design is best suited for businesses that are content heavy, or smaller e-commerce sites. As always I am interested in helping meet any further needs for custom skinning solutions. Feel free to ask any questions or comment on the skin using the support forums - feedback is always welcome! I am excited to offer more skins for the DotNetNuke community.

Just announced: DotNetNuke® Training dates for October Learn DotNetNuke from the experts at Engage - Official DotNetNuke® Training Provider.

Engage is honored to have 2 sites chosen as finalists in the DNN OpenForce Community Choice Awards contest. Please cast your vote for one of our sites!

Here at Engage we’ve been doing DotNetNuke Training for well over 5 years now. Initially we provided training for existing clients, but over time we realized that we had the knowledge and a market to branch out and provide our training services on a larger scale. We even became the first, and so far the only, Official DotNetNuke Training provider. Starting tomorrow (Tuesday 9/15/2009) we are conducting another round of our DotNetNuke Portal Admin class via our webinar instruction. Our webinar training provides some of our DNN classes over a three day period. This round is Tuesday through Thursday this week, from Noon to 2pm CST. If you’re interested in attending our Portal Admin class for further instruction in the art of DotNetNuke administration be sure to get signed up as there is still time. If you are interested in other training information about DotNetNuke I’ve taken the time to write up a little more detail about the training that Engage provides for DotNetNuke, please check out the full blog post for that info.

This is my very first commercial skin I created almost three years ago when I was new to DotNetNuke. Since then I’ve been tied up with client work and custom design and it didn’t give me much time have a second look at it. With the introduction of DotNetNuke 5.0 a while back, I kept telling myself that Engage: Adaptive must be updated to comply with the latest version of the framework. Since DotNetNuke 5.x has been widely adopted, I decided it’s now time to give it a facelift. Engage: Adaptive 2.0 (it’s the version, not web 2.0) was released last week as I wanted to take advantage of the improved skinning and parsing engine. Although the older version of Adaptive (Engage: Adaptive 1.0) works in 5.x (install as legacy skin), you’ll find Engage: Adaptive 2.0 with a more structurally sound with a few minor changes in its design and layout.

Engage: TRANSLUCENT is a clean, simple design fully optimized for site performance and customization. The skin would be ideal for any small business site, personal site, blog, or online portfolio. The inspiration for the design revolves around my belief in the importance of whitespace, or negative space, as well as a detailed eye on typography. This skin acts as a nice minimal support for bold content, or as a great springboard for those who are a little more DIY, but need a bit of a head start with the code.

The 2009 St. Louis Day of .NET featured six DotNetNuke sessions. From "DotNetNuke Jumpstart" to "Maintaining Design Integrity in a CMS with Smart Implementation Techniques" and "Packaging and Installing DotNetNuke Extensions", a good variety of DotNetNuke topics were represented.

Joe Brinkman wrote a positive (and in my biased opinion fair) review of “DotNetNuke 5: User’s Guide,” the book co-authored by Chris and me. The thing I was most excited about in Joe’s review was that he understood one of our key goals in writing this book – keep it simple. DotNetNuke can be an extremely powerful and useful tool for building websites.

So if you have been under a rock lately, you might not have heard about the upcoming St. Louis Day of DotNet event at the end of August, the 28th and 29th. I’ve been working the past few weeks to try to get some DotNetNuke sessions lined up, and so far things are coming along nicely! We’ve got at least 4 sessions currently, and I believe we’ll have probably 8 total sessions if myself and Cuong Dang get a couple more submissions in there later today.

We've just released updates to Engage: Events and Engage: Employment.

So it’s been way too long, 6 months to be pretty exact, since we had a new release for Engage: Publish. Well last Thursday it finally came! We released Publish 5.4 on our website, though without announcement because of everything else we have had going on. Well here’s the announcement!

So Dang and I headed off to Tampa Florida on Thursday to get ready for the Day of DNN event, as well as teach a few of our DotNetNuke Workshops. We flew down Thursday morning, picked up our rental car (after an upgrade to a full size that worked out well, more on that later). Once we made our way over to the hotel we checked in and began working on our presentations for Saturday, there’s nothing like leaving it to the last minute right? When we checked in we picked up two packages, one with the materials for our workshops on Friday/Sunday, and one from Wrox with three freshly printed copies of my new book, the first copies I’d actually seen in print so I was pretty excited about that.

I had the privilege of presenting at the first annual DayfOfDNN event in beautiful Tampa, FL last week. Chris and I arrived in Tampa a few days before the event started to get situated for our pre-event training workshop. The weather was by far much better than the hot and humid summer days in St. Louis. We had a great time meeting new people and working with them at the pre-event workshop and the pre-event party.

In just under 24 hours I’ll be starting the first in our series of paid DotNetNuke Virtual Classroom sessions, our DotNetNuke Essentials class.  If you’re interested in signing up there is still time! $199 for 6 hours of instructor led DNN training, 2 hours each day. We had a great turnout to our two DotNetNuke Intro session that we held over the past few weeks, and will be offering that class again on June 3rd. http://www.engagesoftware.com/Training/Virtual_Classroom.aspx

I believe many DotNetNuke® fans out there are aware of the one-day event in Tampa, FL called Day of DotNetNuke®. Orlando DotNetNuke User Group President, Will Strohl, organizes this event and it seems to be a promising turnout. I am just excited to see another major DotNetNuke® event happen in addition to OpenForce in the U.S. Day of DotNetNuke is organized to provide free education to all who are interested in learning about the platform. I see this event as an opportunity to evangelize DotNetNuke® project to many who are new to it.

Engage: Rotator is our content rotation module for DotNetNuke.  We just released the 2.0 update with full templatability and a huge number of new rotation and animation options.

We are now offering DotNetNuke Webinar training classes. We held our first class on April 22nd and had an excellent turnout and feedback for this first free session called “Introduction to DotNetNuke”. We are offering this free webinar again on May 6th, 2009, you can get signed up for the class by visiting our Virtual Classroom page. The Intro to DotNetNuke course is one hour long, and runs from 12pm CDT to 1PM CDT.

So we've been in the building for well over five years now, I've been with Engage 5yrs coming up in May. While we did move downstairs, from upstairs (obviously), in that time, we have never had a sign on the building with our name. Well today that changed, check out the new Engage signage out front, I must say, I think it looks great! But now, instead of people calling the landlord to see if the office space is available, they may call and ask "What's engage?" Check out the picture of our new sign in the full blog post.

Recently I’ve been spending quite a bit of my time working on one project in particular; an eLearning Management System (LMS) for DotnetNuke. I’d like to take some time to describe Engage:Campus and then cover the basics of course creation and course enrollment. In Plain English Engage: Campus allows businesses to create courses that are relevant to their business, deliver them to the audience of their choice online, and track the results that are generated as users take courses.

I’m proud to announce that we’ve released our second commercial skin, Engage: BEFITTING. The release of Engage:BEFITTING is also a pretty good time for me to introduce myself; so hello there. My name is Anthony Overkamp, and I am a designer here at Engage Software. This skin package is my first of hopefully many new designs to come to help provide clean, flexible design and presence on the web.

This blog post marks the release of a new module for DotNetNuke. It addresses a common feature request of many web sites - empowering users to email a friend a link to your site. It is free module which includes source code. There was a lot of effort put in to making the module very clean and simple. For more information about the module, or to download the module, visit the Engage Software product page for Engage: Tell A Friend or the listing on Snowcovered. While the pages listed above provide all of the necessary information - I'd like to share a few technical highlights/features with those of you reading this who are developers...

I'll be heading to Orlando next week for my first INETA event for 2009. I'll be presenting at the DNN User Group meeting on 3/5. If you're in the area be sure to come to the meeting, I'll have some Engage: Hunting shirts to give away (the same bright orange that were a hit in Las Vegas at Open Force!). Check out the full blog post for all of the meeting information.

We just released Engage: Events, and realized that our DNN 4 compatible package might not work exactly as we'd like when used in DNN 5.  If you're a DNN module developer, you probably already know that there have been a ton of changes to the module installer in 5.0.  It will still accept the old module packages, but you'll miss out on a lot if you don't provide an updated package.

The first major update for Engage: Events has been released!  Engage: Events is the event management module for DotNetNuke from Engage Software.

For the past several years, our policy has been to not respond to RFPs. The process is flawed and a complete waste of time and resources. We are confident in our ability to deliver quality work at a fair price. We want to work with clients who want to work with us. What's so wrong about that? Shouldn't it be that simple?

Want to make the most of DNN? Curious about the recommended site settings? Couldn’t make it to Vegas for Open Force? We’ve got you covered.

One thing that many professionals have been embracing for years is developing web site using web standards. DotNetNuke recently released version 5.0 with

Last weekend I attended a local .NET Developer conference - the St. Louis Day of .NET. It was a regular work day (9-5) of .NET-centric one-hour sessions. Most of the sessions were based (to varying degrees) on content from the recent Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles.

Inspired by Seth Godin’s blog post “Don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”, I decided to write this post to remind you about the job of evangelizing DotNetNuke if you’re already a big fan.

I had finally had it. I was no longer accepting the lack of tool support while editing the .SqlDataProvider scripts for DotNetNuke modules. I needed to figure out a way to make Visual Studio treat those files as if they ended with .sql instead of .SqlDataProvider so that it would give me syntax highlighting for my SQL scripts.

It was my first time to attend the conference in Vegas this year and it was a great experience. I had the opportunity to meet with many core team members in person and talked about how DotNetNuke project has gained some momentum in recent years.

One thing we learned in Las Vegas at OpenForce 08 last week, one of many things actually, was that most people think that Engage Software only provides DotNetNuke Training. While we do provide training, and have teamed up with the DotNetNuke Corporation to be an Official DotNetNuke Training Provider, training is not the only thing we do relating to DNN. Actually, while it has grown tremendously over the past year with our expanded marketing efforts, training makes up only a small portion of our business.

Have you heard of our Engage: Employment module for DotNetNuke? I'm talking about our module for posting job listings on your website and allowing folks to apply for them. We have today released a new version of the module to fix a number of bugs that have been discovered, while completely revamping the administrative experience.

So for those of you who attended the Post Conference training last week after OpenForce you know we tried to squeeze too much information into the session and had to leave out some of the important items from the module development topics. This blog post will hopefully serve as a pointer to get you headed in the right direction for your module development!

Shaun Walker's DotNetNuke keynote was a great overview of the current state of DNN and the road ahead.

Chris Hammond did a great job with both of his sessions - Selling DotNetNuke and DNN 5.0 Administration They were both well attended and well received.

So OpenForce 2008 has come and gone way too quickly! It’s Thursday afternoon and three of us from Engage are still sitting here...

The current provider model in DotNetNuke is very flexible, but with that flexibility comes development overhead. Over the past few months I've started thinking about how much time I spend simply on [easy, repetitive] data access tasks, and its a little depressing.

This post is overdue. I wanted to use this image in my slide deck for a presentation I gave last month at the Bloomington, IL .NET user group, but...

There must be a thousand people or more sitting here in the room with us watching Scott Guthrie’s keynote here on the first day of DevConnections/OpenForce 2008. Scott is currently showing some of the cool features that shipped with .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2k8 SP1 regarding object relational mappers (demo done in vb.net).

Well it took a bit of work, but we got the booth all set up. Ian, Chris, Dang and I did it all relatively painlessly. Chris took a neat time-lapse video of the process [coming soon]...

It's Sunday night and some of the guys from Engage are prepping themselves for spending this week in Las Vegas at the OpenForce DotNetNuke conference. Ian Robinson, Cuong Dang, Rich Campbell and myself, Chris Hammond, will be starting our journey at Lambert Airport tomorrow around noon.

Stay in touch and up-to-date with the happenings at OpenForce '08 by visiting the Engage Software Blog. We will have 4 employees in attendance, speaking, manning our booth, conducting post-conference training, and blogging about the conference!

With just 5 days until OpenForce starts in Las Vegas there is still time to get registered! This will be the ultimate DNN gathering for 2008.

When building DotNetNuke modules, a number of times I've run up against the issue of trying to instantiate a ModuleInfo instance with only a module ID. However, the GetModule signature on ModuleController takes both a module ID and a tab ID. In this latest instance where I've come against this issue, I was actually trying to get a tab ID based on the module ID, so I obviously didn't already had one to provide.

Starting in DotNetNuke version 4.9.0, only the module.css in the main folder of a module is referenced, regardless of where the control being loaded lives (unless there isn't a module.css there). Therefore, you only need one module.css to control the styles of all of your controls.

With the new skinning changes in DotNetNuke, it may be helpful to give an overview of available approaches to skin developers.

It shouldn't be hard to get started writing a module for DotNetNuke, but it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of help especially when you are wanting to use C#. At Engage, we have created a Visual Studio project template which will get you started developing a C# DotNetNuke module, using a Web Application project (rather than the, in my opinion, much more cumbersome Web Site project). It is available for free on our downloads page after registering on the site.

Sometimes a simple change and all of a sudden your module is mysteriously showing errors in strange places. Here's are a couple of tips to keep some of these scenarios from affecting your modules, and how to recognize them if they do.

After three public pre-releases, and weeks of wrestling through user-submitted bugs and those we found (so that you don't have to!), we are now ready to release Engage: Events to the eagerly awaiting public! After we cemented our feature-set in the Beta release, we have hunted down no less than 15 bugs, ranging from grammar to complete show-stoppers. We are very thankful for the support of the community as we worked together to create a DotNetNuke module that fits your needs, from the ground up, based on your suggestions.

The final BETA release is feature complete. What you see in Engage: Events BETA will be what you get in Engage: Events 1.0. We're still seeking your help to make sure the features that are included in Engage: Events work properly, function as expected, and position the product to quickly improve upon the initial release.

It's been a few months coming but Engage: Publish 5.2 released last week while I was off in Kansas racing. There are a lot of new features/enhancements and bug fixes in the release. You can read a forum thread where I discuss a lot of the new functionality and changes here. You can also check out the release notes in our Wiki.

Approached by the team at DotNetNuke, Engage agreed to contribute our efforts to help branding DotNetNuke by creating a new design template on the new default skin.

We take pride in trying to offer professional products and services to the DotNetNuke community. In providing commercial modules, two components of the module define professionalism - the quality of the product, and the quality of the support.

Do you have a gauge for your site's effectiveness, performance, and overall health? By offering a consolidated display of site metrics and portal administration tools, Dashboard acts like a diagnostic test for your website.

We've released the next Alpha release of the Engage: Events module for DotNetNuke. Try it out and let us know what you think and what you'd like to see from this module.

We've been hard at work to create a new DotNetNuke module to manage your website's events. Take a look and let us know where you want us to go with it.

So I've been saving this blog post for over a month, now that there is information out in the open I'm going to post it! OpenForce08 is coming! Being held at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas again this year, November 10th thru the 13th. The OpenForce08.com website is still getting updated but you can find out information about OpenForce08 by checking out the DevConnections website http://www.devconnections.com/openforce/

Skinning is not a skill; it’s a profession that requires knowledge and experience in understanding the DotNetNuke platform (especially with the skinning engine), web standards, as well as aesthetic design.

Back in November 2007, I was invited to be a technical reviewer for a book called DotNetNuke Skinning Tutorial by Packt Publishing Company. Having seen limited resources about DotNetNuke skinning, I agreed to be involved in the project instantly. It was an exciting experience since I have never had any experience in working with formal documentations besides DotNetNuke training documentations I wrote here with the team.

It took two years, and adding girls to the team, but we finally won a softball game! In 2006 we played in a men's rec league and managed to screw up every game just enough to lose. Well tonight was the first game of the 2008 Season and we pulled off a winner! 15-8!

After weeks of preparation, our first training offering in St. Louis is complete and I can finally relax a little bit. At Engage, we have offered on-site training for quite sometime; however, it is such a different and exciting experience for all of us for holding training classes in St. Louis.

 

In the first DotNetNuke newsletter from the DotNetNuke Corporation for 2008 the project spotlight showcases a website that is using Engage: Publish for content management. Here's some of the text that was included in the newsletter. "At the ZoneDiet.com site, visitors can get a wealth of information about the Zone Diet, in addition to being able to order official Zone Products (Omega-3 Concentrates, Food Items, Polyphenols, Supplements, Skin Care Products, Books) through the e-commerce store. "

Many times I have been asked the same question by various clients regarding the DotNetNuke CSS load order. Many of them were having difficulties when customizing their modules and skins to have uniform styles. Simply understanding the DotNetNuke CSS hierarchy is essential when performing these tasks.

We at Engage Software have just released the latest update to our DotNetNuke Jobs Listing module, Engage: Employment, version 1.3.  This is a module you can use on your company's DNN site to list the job openings you have available at your various locations, and accept and sort applications and applicants.

Have you ever used the DefaultButton property on an ASP.NET Panel, only to find that it doesn't work in Firefox? Here's an easy way to use DotNetNuke's ClientAPI to achieve the same result for more than just IE.

Engage Software is proud to announce we have attained Gold Partner status within the Microsoft Partner Program.

Earlier today we had a customer post a question in the forums on www.engagemodules.com regarding using Engage: Publish as a replacement for the Text/HTML module within DotNetNuke.

Earlier today I created a list of blogs, podcasts, and web sites that are of interest to me as a developer. This are the sites I keep tabs on so I can stay up on the latest and keep learning. Some of them I frequent more regularly than others...

For my personal website I converted from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke, using Engage: Publish as the Blogging platform. I did a pretty lengthy writeup of the conversion process. You can read more about the conversion on the writeup.

As a developer, and specifically as a DotNetNuke developer, there are a number of directories that I have to navigate to regularly.  In particular with DotNetNuke, I'm going to C:\inetpub\wwwroot\DotNetNuke\Website\DesktopModules quite a bit.  So, instead of having to try to type that in all the time, or navigate through the folder structure, I've defined an environment variable "dm" that is defined as that path to my Desktop Modules folder.  I can just type %dm% into an explorer prompt and be there without any hassle.  I've also setup a %wwwroot% shortcut, though it gets used much less often.  It's a lot like keeping a shortcut around in your dock/quick launch toolbar, but you can also use it in dialogs.  Hopefully this can help you trim off a few more seconds/minutes of monotony throughout your day.

For those of you who may have missed it, Engage: Publish 4.5 released last week. This release has some big improvements for the module, and lays the groundwork for a new major releasing coming in the next month or so. Read more for more information!

We have released a major update for Engage: Employment, our DNN job listing module.  In version 1.2, we have added a number of new features and fixed all known bugs from version 1.1.

In April of this year I threw a little module together called Engage: F3 that allows site administrators and superusers to easily search for strings of content within their Text/HTML modules and Engage: Publish content on a site. Recently I've taken the time to come up with a new release of the module that provides Search and Replace functionality for the Text/HTML module.

Tonight we released the latest version of Engage Publish, 4.4.4 (12/9/2007). This release has a few minor bug fixes, a few UI improvements, and some enhanced features!

If you're DotNetNuke portal isn't sending emails as you would expect you likely haven't configured your SMTP settings properly. To configure your SMTP settings try the following.

Best practices for developing DotNetNuke modules dictates that we use the development.config as our web.config, which includes running our development sites under Medium Trust.  This is necessary so that we don't inadvertently introduce code that requires Full Trust into our module and thereby restrict it to customers running in Medium Trust.

Running all the new .NET 3.0 goodness on your development machine, but want to install content templates (maybe the DNN starter kit?) for Visual Studio 2005? You may see this error: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Wizardframework, Version=8.0.0.0,...'

We have just released a minor update to Engage: Rotator, our content rotating module for DotNetNuke.  This fixes issues some folks were seeing where content would "jump" a bit when it was rotating.  If you don't already have it, pick up a copy from our Buy Now page on Engage Modules.

As some of you know Myself, Rich and Henry from Engage Software have been at OpenForce07 in Las Vegas this week. OpenForce07 is the first North American DotNetNuke conference, being held this week.

For those of you who had seen it appeared on Engage Modules site last year and was removed, it's now time to revisit the "Skins" page and find out about our current and upcoming commercial (also free will be introduced in the near future) DotNetNuke skins. Last week , we introduced our very first DotNetNuke commercial skin to public called Engage: ADAPTIVE.

Version 1.1.2 of Engage: Employment has been released to the web.  It is currently available from EngageModules.com, and will be available from SnowCovered before too long.  See the Downloads page of EngageModules.com for instructions on how to get access to the new version there if you have purchased from another website.

Well today was a fun day for the first day of OpenForce07. At noon we had a core team gathering over at the Luxor. It was an excellent time for everyone to socialize and meet face to face, many for the first time. I can't even begin to list off all the names of people I met for the first time today but it was a great event. Many thanks to Michael Washington for organizing it and Will M. from Activemodules.com for sponsoring it. The discussions we all got to have were great and I look forward to continuing many of them throughout the week!

I'm personally excited to announce that the 4.4 release of Engage: Publish has been uploaded to our EngageModules.com website and is available for purchase. If you've previously purchased Engage: Publish and are within your one year window you can also download this release for free.

There is a new ComponentArt rich text editor on the market - is it ready for DNN?

So I had hoped to have the 4.3.7 release of Engage: Publish out last week, but towards the end of the week a few things came up in the code that we decided needed to be handled prior to a release. A few of the items were small bugs that had popped up in some new testing we were doing. One of the major things was performance issues that were starting to pop up.

Last weekend most of us from Engage went down to enjoy the Tulsa Tech Fest.  While the individual sessions were hit or miss, the keynotes were excellent and got us all excited to start using Silverlight, and we all definitely had fun together.

Nine of us from Engage Software went to Tulsa Tech Fest in Tulsa Oklahoma. I personally gave three presentations related to DotNetNuke, while the rest of the guys ventured around to various other presentation topics. Some of them will blog later today.

If you recall the basic marketing principles in college when you’re taking “Marketing 101”, two of the elements that contribute to the success of your products are making it easy to use/operate and writing the best user manual.

On Wednesday of this week, we made our first public release of Engage: Rotator on Engage Modules.  If you've wondered about that snazzy looking rotating banner on the front page of Engage Software, this is it.  This is a product that has evolved over the last few months from the needs of various clients, and has now come to the point where we've invested a lot of time in making it user friendly and configurable.  Have a look on our demo site and see if this could help add a nice touch to your site.

Mr. Dukes pointed me to this blog post by Daniel Moth and of course I accepted the challenge (or was it just an inquiry......maybe I'm overly competitive...)here is the link to try it yourself: TypequickYOUR RESULTS ARE: Number of words typed: 306Test duration: 3 minSpeed: 102.2 words/min. (511 keystrokes/min.)Error penalty: 13Accuracy: 95.8%I did not have to mess with the scrolling window as some have had to.....and it was my first try....also i fix errors as i go.....

Well it's been a busy summer for me and it looks like it isn't slowing down just yet. Earlier this month I spent a week in the Washington DC area conducting some advanced DotNetNuke Module Development Training for a new client. In just over a week I'll be in Topeka Kansas for the SCCA Solo Nationals, I'm definitely looking forward to getting away from computers for a week and just enjoying racing a car or two!

Engage Software has just launched another website. The new site is a portal for The Ticket Guys (www.theticketguys.com). It is built using the DotNetNuke portal framework, though we had to develop new modules and enhance existing modules to get all of the desired functionality on the site. So if you're looking for St. Louis Cardinals, St. Louis Rams, or Boston Red Sox tickets be sure to check The Ticket Guys.

Have you ever wanted to change what DotNetNuke says on it's controls? Change "Register" to "Join Us" or "Terms of Use" to "Member Agreement"? It's easier than you think.

It often happens that I would like to know the size of an image so that I can smartly resize it in various situations. Until today, I had never been quite able to get everything that I needed to get it done.

Are you going to OpenForce07 in Las Vegas November 5-8th 2007? I am! And I even have the badge displaying on http://chrishammond.com

Using a DropDownList, RadioButtonList, CheckBoxList, or other similar control as a trigger of an Update Panel (rather than in the Update Panel itself) will cause the initial value not to fire a SelectedIndexChanged event.

A few years back I was enlightened by Chris Paterra in the ways of using NANT scripts to aid in the packaging of DotNetNuke Modules. Using NANT to package your WAP (web application project) modules within Visual Studio 2005 is a snap, and can save you a LOT of time each time you have to come up with a new release.

Welcome back to the DotNetNuke tips! I started doing this over a year ago, though with getting married last fall and working on my Datsun 240Z lately I haven't blogged near as much lately about DNN topics. So here we go, starting up again with my DotNetNuke Tips.

I'm happy to announce that I've been selected to speak at the OpenForce07 DotNetNuke conference in Las Vegas during this year's fall DevConnections. DevConnections looks to be one of the larger conferences this year now that the PDC has been cancelled for this year. I'll be presenting on "Portal Administration Best Practices".

If you're anything like me, you've been greatly looking forward to Visual Studio Orcas, with its enhanced support for JavaScript.  You might also not know that some of that functionality is available to us currently in Visual Studio 2005.  It's not exactly easy to setup and use, but once you get it going, it can really help out when you're trying to figure out why, for example, all elements on your page suddenly disappear, only in IE.

I'm proud to finally announce that the DotNetNuke Wiki Project has officially released the first "production" version of the Wiki module. This version is labeled 04.00.01 and can be downloaded from the Project downloads page. You can find out more information for the Wiki module on the Project Page, and some basic instructions, version history and release notes available on the Wiki Example page, which is running the released version of the Wiki module. Thanks to Josh Handel for helping to get this project rolling again by donating his Ktomics Wiki module to be converted and used for the official DotNetNuke Wiki module.

Last week we were able to release the long awaited new release of Engage: Publish with all new bells and whistles.

When developing code for .NET, there are a number of attributes that you can define on parts of your code to make your job easier while you are debugging. These are new in .NET 2.0, and part of the System.Diagnostics namespace.

I've had too many clients come to me and ask how they can search through all of their Text/HTML modules on a portal to look for links that point to their development URL rather than their production URL. Instead of telling them they had to manually look at every page to find all instances of these invalid links I created a new module, available from www.engagemodules.com

Yesterday, version four of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK was released (as noted in this blog post, V4 VS SDK Targeting VS 2005 Released!).  While I don't plan on developing any Visual Studio add-ins or extensions, I noticed that the SDK included SandCastle, which is a tool to build documentation based on your inline XML comments.  If you're working with large or distant groups, it can help to compile some of your work into a readable API document, and SandCastle will do that for you.  You'll need to go to http://www.sandcastledocs.com/ to get an automation script or GUI, since this release doesn't include any interface.  Get it here: Visual Studio 2005 SDK version 4.0.

The Rating control from the AjaxControlToolkit has been of use to use as we work on some of our websites that use our Engage: Publish module.  However, we needed to make a change to the style of the container around the Rating in order to change a background image from saying "Please rate!" to "Thanks for rating."  We tried wrapping it in an UpdatePanel to get at the CssClass, but we couldn't get it to react.  Eventually, we got the following javascript to work (which needs to be declared after divRating is declared).

Since the 1.0 release of ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, we've been making use of the new functionality offered us through AJAX, both from the core extensions and through the AjaxControlToolkit.  However, we've run into a road block a number of times when we're tried to use the new UpdatePanel control to add some AJAX responsiveness into our web pages.  In short, we hadn't ever gotten it to work.

Sometimes, you have elements on your webpage (such as a Solpart menu or the greyed-out background of a ModalPopup) that you want to display over an embedded Flash element. And they don't. And it's frustrating.

With the 1.0 release of ASP.NET AJAX, we have started integrating controls from the control toolkit into some of our DotNetNuke modules. We've come across a couple of issues with the ModalPopup control in the (admittedly still Beta) AJAX control toolkit.

I see this requested all the time, so I figured I'd blog how I proceed with upgrading a DNN Instance.

Just in time for Christmas a new version of DotNetNuke has been released. On its 4 year anniversary of the first release, DotNetNuke released version 4.4.

I just finished reading Eric Sick on the Business of Software by Eric Sink, the founder of SourceGear -- makers of source control products Vault and SourceOffSite (which we use here at Engage Software). It was a great book. Very insightful, funny and inspiring. I recommend it to anyone who works for an "ISV" (Independent Software Vendor). While the author targets the "Micro-ISV," I consider Engage Software to be more of a "Mini-ISV" but the concepts still apply. The book is essentially a collection of blog posts, categorized into sections: Entrepreneurship, People, Marketing and Sales. Since each chapter is a former blog post, there is a lot of over-lap with previous chapters, giving the sense of deja-vu. But all-in-all, it's an easy read and I really enjoyed it.

On friday a Beta version of ASP.NET ajax was released, the number of features in the release is less than in the last CTP, but the features that remain have had some very welcome enhancements made.

This weekend I attended the Tulsa TechFest and had the opportunity to sit through the entire Ajax/Atlas track. While it wasn’t the focus of every presentation at the fest, I have decided to focus this post on the new Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax web development technology, which currently is out as a Community Technology Preview.

Read more for information about our DotNetNuke Training offerings.

Today on DotNetNuke.com there was a major announcement for the project. View the rest of this post for more information!

Okay, those of us who use Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to send email probably enjoy most of the features, including managing contacts, integrating our calendars with other Exchange users and Outlook’s ease of use in managing our calendar events and reminders. So why shouldn’t we use Outlook to send our corporate email newsletters and announcements? In this article, I’ll tell you what you’re missing by using Outlook and not using email software or relying on an email service provider.

Who is to say that one of the giants in sport business does not need more brand attention? A local advertising agency, Schupp Co in St. Louis has helped Cardinals with a great caper kicking off the 2006 Season – Redbird heist.

According to BtoBOnline.com, email read and click rates have dropped considerably (22% and 21% respectively) during the 4th Quarter of 2005 compared to 2004, while volume has risen 50%. 

Add another item to the list of things you should try in your email newsletter.  B-to-B Online says you should deliver podcasts to your email newsletter audience. David A. Fish explains in this article why this technology is useful and relevant from your newsletters. If you don't know what podcasting is: Catch up at wikipedia.

Dan Klein and I had a lot of fun speaking about Effective Email Marketing to the Association of Lutheran Development Executives. Thanks to those who attended. What speech about integrated marketing wouldn't be complete without asking for feedback? We do that here (click for download).