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.

I'd like to thank everyone who joined us in St. Louis the first week of April. It was such a great opportunity to meet new people, to network and to share stories and experiences in working with DotNetNuke.

After years of helping clients building online systems at Engage, I can finally put up some time to build my website.

I kept telling myself that I needed to create a website where I can rant about things in life and share pictures and memories with family and friends. It took me more than a year to make this commitment happen. Well, it is finally here and I hope that it will primarily serve as a means of communication to my friends, family and other readers that far away.

Besides blogging about life, this site was also created with the intention of contributing to the DotNetNuke community by sharing my knowledge and experience with the framework. I also hope that my site may be used as an example of how DotNetNuke may be used.

Skinning has been one of the most challenging topics in DotNetNuke development. The community has created a fairly versatile skinning engine for non-developers to adapt; however, to achieve perfection or superiority in DotNetNuke skinning requires tremendous amount of time as well as being detail-oriented.

There are a few reasons that skinning has become cumbersome to master:

1. Lack of resources (majority of resources including books and documentations are developer-oriented, it's difficult for non-developers to learn and comprehend the concepts).
2. Although [TOKENS] makes skinning easier, the framework has poor user experience in demonstrating the skinning process.
3. Lack of flexibility for web standards approach.

Having seen quite a few people lately asking about how to get started with DotNetNuke skinning, I decided to compile a list of resources so everybody can share. Although it might not be the ultimate list of DotNetNuke skinning resources, it certainly helps providing a more in-depth guide in what is available out there.

It is always a challenge to get started on something (well, at least to me). But once you get familiar, it's an exciting learning curve.

I sometimes run into beautiful designs provided by clients using great combinations of layout and type. I enjoy working with them because of the design focus spans across the website to give unique values to the brands. For those designs, the element called container as in DotNetNuke skinning language often plays a small role. They sometime just need to behave as a placeholder for content.

A few people were asking me about similar situation and how to approach when working with those designs. My suggestion to them is to use a clean simple container and manage the design through CSS.

After reading “Are you sure you want to buy that module?” by Will Morgenweck at ActiveModule, it inspired me to write my own version of some sort that similar to it called “Are you sure you want to buy that skin?”.

When doing a search in Google for commercial skins, you might end up at some landing pages (if you lucky enough to see one) with the skin that you’re looking for. However, not everybody gets there in the first try.

Shopping for skins isn’t quite an easy job. It’s similar to taking your computer to BestBuy and have them “helped” with some issues when you don’t have much knowledge about it. The Geek Squad are probably speaking G(r)eek to you and you’ll be leaving the store paying whatever they told you to.

Each year, DotNetNuke Corporation gathers engineers, developers, designers, and many others whose work involve in Microsoft ASP.NET platform in one of the biggest events called OpenForce™. The purpose is to share knowledge and experience among professionals as well as networking opportunities with experts worldwide.

A few months ago DotNetNuke Corporation called for speakers to present at the annual North American conference in Vegas, I submitted my proposal with multiple topics surrounding DotNetNuke UI design, Skinning, and Web Standards.

A good friend of mine, Ian Robinson (also a Lead Instructor for Module Development at Engage), went to Texas a few weeks ago to provide training for clients. When he was approached by a potential client asking about skinning, he immediately mentioned my name thought it just helps carried on the conversation. The gentleman took it seriously and asked more about what I have done in the past. Ian struggled to pull out the hard evidence because he doesn't know all the projects that I've worked on since we haven't had time to keep our portfolio up-to-date.

Today, I introduced a quick page listed some of the projects I've done and hope it helps to give a better idea to potential clients of Engage. Although the page you find lacks of detail about the projects, it does carry external links (if applicable) to the live sites so you can have a better look. Some of them are Engage projects and some are my personal work.

I intend to provide more detail about the projects when I get some free time. So if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me and I'll be happy to talk through the detail of each.

Also, if you find thumbnail images without the links, it's either a work in progress project or an off-line site. But I sure will provide detail of all the screenshots.

DotNetNuke has grown quickly over the past few years. But it has only been major changes for the developer community. The question we should ask here is how do we bring the framework closer to the general audiences where all businesses from small to large can understand and utilize it for their online presence?

dnnGallery was introduced to help answer it. dnnGallery is the place to showcase DotNetNuke projects to all audiences from non-technical, business professionals to DotNetNuke developers.

I designed the site with layout to showcase projects in a way that provides valuable information to visitors. Then the design was implemented into a DotNetNuke skin package with XHTML/CSS and Web Standards Compliance approach.

The site was developed with great help from a very good friend of mine, Ian Robinson. Ian also a DotNetNuke training instructor at Engage Software and has extensive knowledge of module development. Some of you may have already known him through taking our training courses at Engage.

It is official that I joined the DotNetNuke Gallery team led by Néstor Sánchez. Compare to the last time I looked at the module was more than a year ago. Wow, if you haven’t seen it recently, you should definitely check it out.

Currently, the module is still in 4.3.0 Beta. But tremendous improvement and bug fixes have been implemented. You can view a live demo here and get a general idea for your next projects.

My main responsibility for the Gallery module will be helping with the UI design and usability in general. Keep an eye on the project; I’ll be updating some cool UI elements and templates if you wish to use this module for your production. Also, I’ll make sure that I’ll be picky about the workflow to make everybody’s job in managing this module easier.

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.

Thanks to all who came to my session in Tulsa. I hope you enjoyed the presentation and learned a bit about DotNetNuke skinning and its engine.

It might be too much information in an hour and a half, but I couldn’t consolidate the topics to make the entire presentation valuable to everybody. Anyway, here’s the presentation, feel free to download and leave feedback and comments to let me know what you think.

My good friend, Ian Robinson, is presenting his session about “What’s new with DotNetNuke 5.0?”. I guess we’ll be heading out soon when he’s done.

Landed to Vegas safe and sound yesterday. The team went to get some drinks at the Border Grill at TheHOTEL and met with many DotNetNuke professionals around the country. I was pretty excited to meet with those guys in person since we can only communicate online when they all reside in so many different places. We all had a good time!

After having a few drinks, we went to the exhibit hall to get some update about the booth graphic and got our hands dirty to set it up.

Chris decided to set up a time lapse video so we can see how progresses.