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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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.