News

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.