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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.