I received word the other day that I’ve been selected to present two sessions at this October’s DNNCon.  It’s always great to spend time with the DNN community, and be able to contribute by sharing what I’ve been learning, as well as learning from the community (both directly and indirectly).

When I looked through the list of sessions, I saw a lot that looked good and that I was excited to have the chance to see.  I also noticed as I scanned the list that there weren’t very many surprises in the list of presenters, myself included.  I saw many names that I immediately recognized, most of whom I have heard present many times.  So, I wanted to give some encouragement to anyone who thought about submitting a presentation but didn’t, or folks who don’t think they have anything worth presenting about.  We’d love to have you.  In fact, we need to have some fresh perspectives, new voices challenging us to see beyond ourselves, challenging us to bring in other paradigms that we’ve missed while we’ve had our DNN blinder on the past few years.  I’ll be really excited when I don’t have a session picked for a DNN conference, so that they could make room for some new voices :-)

I’m really excited for (and hope I get to attend) James McKee’s session on unit testing, a topic which doesn’t get enough attention in our community, from a presenter who I’m not familiar with.  Likewise, it’s good to see Jeff McWherter presenting again (saw him for the first time at Southern Fried DNN), giving a presentation about when to use DNN (and when not to use it).

All of that said, I’ll be revisiting a topic that I presented on at Southern Fried DNN, contributing to Open Source projects.  DNN’s definitely made advances in this regard, with still more to come, so I’m excited to revise that presentation to highlight the new openness to outside contributions, and changes in what it looks like to contribute much more easily and directly.

My other presentation is going to cover the new extension point that DNN 7.1 introduced with the Advanced URL Provider.  Your custom extensions (or other 3rd party extensions) can now give administrators much greater control over the URLs that are produced.  Just like we no longer see TabID in the URL everywhere, you can completely remove BlogID, PostID, ItemID, and whatever else from the URLs on your site, leaving only beautifully meaningful content to define the URL.

Fundamentally, the DNN community can only be as strong as the people contributing to it.  There are a lot of us who've been doing DNN (and many of us doing only DNN) for years and years, and we need you and people like you to lend your voice to the conversation.  Your perspective is valuable, and you know things other people want to know.  Even if presenting isn't your thing, be a voice in the community, at the conferences, on the Twitters, at user groups, and wherever you encounter people who use (and hopefully love) DNN.