A long-awaited DotNetNuke 4.9 released last week has made the community excited. I personally upgraded my web site right at the minute DotNetNuke announced on their homepage the new version is available.
A few notable changes in 4.9 have been fairly documented this time after seeing the community’s frustration of the lack of such friendly documentation/release process when new versions introduced. Thanks to Joe Brinkman’s great documentation efforts, we all now can get the major highlights of updates.
As you can see beside the new default skin, a skin object called “TEXT” also introduced to allow text localization within skins. When Shaun Walker first blogged about it, I was excited to see the improved skinning process and a few enhancements, but let’s take a closer look to see what are the benefits this new skin object give us.
For those of you who took my classes at Engage, I have an update for you.
Prior to DotNetNuke 4.9, all skins created must contain the single most important token—ContentPane. I usually spend a good amount of time explaining how important this token is and make sure everybody understand before moving on.
Today, working on a project for my client, I made this very simple mistake by not including the ContentPane token in the skin file. Everything worked great from installation to managing content on a page and I didn’t notice there is something missing.
For all DotNetNuke versions prior to 4.9, the system immediately throws an error that it could not locate ContentPane. However, this new version never gives any hints about it.