Day of DotNetNuke® is Getting Closer

DotNetNuke® has gained some great momentum over the past few years. But is it because I’ve been working with it for so long and being bias? Well, I don’t know but truth to be told, not many of my friends (who are also working in similar industry) or people that I’ve talked to know about it. Whether you’ve heard about it or not, Day of DotNetNuke® is a great opportunity to explore the project and meet some of the greatest minds in the community. Day of DotNetNuke® is a one-day event that is organized by Will Strohl, creator of the Orlando DotNetNuke® User Group. He puts some great effort out to organize this event with the hope to help people learn more about the platform without spending a fortune. So far I have seen many of the respective community members hinted on coming and speaking at the event.

List of Grid Design Resource for Building DotNetNuke Web Sites

Designing with grid has been around for decades and applied through various traditional design mediums. But in recent years, the trend to use this technique on the web has become quite popular since many influential web designers took the initiative to introduce it to the world. Among those is Khoi Vinh, a Creative Director for The New Yorks Times Online, and Mark Boulton, a well-know author for publishing his series of his approach in grid design. Many people have discussed the benefits of using grids so in this article, I won’t be talking much about why you should use it. There will be a different post to discuss the reasons to follow grid designs and when to use it.

Browser Compatibility Testing

One of the reasons we all (hopefully, all of us who design web sites) do cross-browser testing is to maintain the integrity of the design. This means that we make sure the site is running and displaying properly across browsers. However, some people may take it to an extreme level by pointing out the fact that their web sites do not look the same in all browsers.

Developer Quick Tip: the BR Element Explained

As many of you may know, I work closely with the development team at Engage on various projects. One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen is that developers use <br /> (BR) to create padding between elements. Sometimes, I see big chuck of BR element being used across just to create a larger padding between their elements. This isn’t new to many developers; I often see it in many commercial modules we bought as well. If you find yourself doing this religiously and not know what it means (some developers know what the BR element does but choose to do so), it is your time to change this bad habit by using the proper HTML tag: the <p> (P) tag.

Usability Review: Links in DotNetNuke

Many web visitors know what a link does on a web page. For web developers and designers, links can perform certain actions in different context; however, it still is going to look like a link to end-users. Pre-defining the CSS selectors (doing the designer's job) on certain links in DotNetNuke framework or any CMS for that matter is not necessary. Sometimes it can cause some addiontional work for others. In DotNetNuke, there are CSS selectors called SkinObject and CommandButton. These two selectors are essential parts of DotNetNuke links to define the look and feel. It is kinda self-expalined that if you want to style the links for any skin objects, you'd find the SkinObject selector and override it in your skin.css file. The same technique goes with CommandButton, but you need to identify which link in the framework that uses SkinObject and which one that uses CommandButton.

Good Usability or Just Common Sense?

Rating is something that I have never seen anybody in DotNetNuke community has done it right. It might sounds pretty extreme, but if you have seen something that provide values as what I am going to discuss in this blog, please feel free to direct me there. I sometimes run into modules (whether if it is free or commercial) that provide rating ability on articles or products in a way that is… somewhat useless to visitors. Things like five-star-rating is one of most common mistake I’ve seen around. Unless you show the amount of people rated on the article and give them an average rating, it does not mean much if you just show visitors that this article has been rated 4 out of 5. This isn’t rocket science that you have to be a UX expert to figure out how to provide values; I believe this is just common sense to most people.