News

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.

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.