SunBlogNuke - DotNetNuke Blog Module

If you are a SunBlogNuke user, maybe you are missing some awesome and essential features, like ContentSlider Widget and Authors Widget. Now we would like to remind you the 2 core widget modules in SunBlogNuke you should know.

What is ContentSlider Widget?

One utility module, enables #DNN administrator to place this module on a web page and point to a specific blog. This is a good feature to highlight one of the featured blog on a landing page to direct website visitor to the blog. It allow you to display a list of posts, like featured post and latest posts. Also you can add this widget module to any page at any time and point it to any blog on the portal.

You can visit the previous post Enhance Featured Widget Module with More Customizations and learn how to extend what you want in your dnn website.

What is Authors Widget?

Another utility module, enables DNN administrator to place this module on the blog page and display a list of authors for the blog.

Today our team released a new optional widget (named 'Photo Viewer Widget') for Ultimate DNN Blog Module – #SunBlogNuke. If you are the client of our module and finding some similar stuffs, that is yours and feel free to get it from widget page (Required Login). It is free, customizable image gallery. It allows you to display the thumbnail of your blog posts on any dnn website in a professional and intuitive way.  Take a look at the screenshot below:

The customizable image viewing widget is based on popular and awesome component – SimpleViewer. Initially the widget was inspired by our showcase gallery and we would like to provide the alternative way to present those excellent websites with their thumbnails.

Then we made some searches in Google and finally got that SimpleViewer is what we want. It is so lightweight and easy to use, it features smart preloading, a resizable interface, thumbnail menu and optional description text. The only thing is that we need to load gallery xml data from our showcase gallery. That should be so easy. Then I took 2 hours to program it with retrieving all the target posts with their thumbnails and provide some basic options for customizing the personation of flash component .

All look great. Please visit the case-studies page to see how it actions.

Note that its minimal required environment is DNN v5.x and SunBlogNuke v4.2.5 and  it is not core widget so we may not support all the possible issues. You can extend it as you want due to the available source code, such as category select support.

Also feel free to leave your thoughts and suggestions here if you indeed would like to let us make it more awesome and we may enhance it for you. In the latest version we will integrated it with Flickr Gallery. That will make it look more awesome.

Today I would like to show you one alternative way to feature related posts on your dnn blog. That is a external plugin [LinkWithin]. You should know most blogging platforms now feature a number of third-party plugins that can display a list of related stories on your blog, or even on other blogs on the Internet. Typically, these plugins will look at how a story was tagged and then display a short list of similar stories that use the same keywords. LinkWithin is the newest contender in this market. The plugin looks at tags, but it also analyzes other factors like relevancy, popularity, and recency. Unlike similar plugins, however, LinkWithin doesn't just display a list of headlines underneath each post, but also a thumbnail with a picture from each post, which makes it far more attractive than most of its competitors and is why I recommend it for you here.

As you know, jQuery image galleries and sliders are very popular these days and found on many many websites, including those ones based on DNN CMS. There are several interesting use cases for image/content sliders, however I think it is most common to use them on the front page to showcase featured articles, latest blog posts or products. Unfortunately, there are so lots lots of free jQuery plugins & premium DNN slider modules available that you no idea which is the best & worthwhile. In this post we’ll see tutorials that can provide you with the resources showing you how image gallery/sliders can be created from ground up for your dnn websites.

Today we would like to share with you "How to Set up Paging for Content Slider Plus". That’s exactly  the issue raised by our clients in the forum because we did not implement the built-in paging feature in both content slider widgets. The original aims of both widgets was to build content slider with a list of posts, like latest posts or featured posts and also to retrieve top x posts to show in the list view or slider view. Further, because of the highly configurable design, you can even add some "Content Slider Plus" magic yourself without too much effort. Let us go ahead with putting Active Paging on to your dnn “Content Slider Plus".

In common, the most important feature for blog platform is its usability so that your reader can get what they want easily. In order to keep your blog clutter-free, you must pay more attentions on your blog’s design, such as the sidebar content & widgets. Today I would like to share you some tips & tricks about monthly archives widget of Ultimate DNN Blog Module - SunBlogNuke. You will learn alterative awesome to display monthly archives list with usability.

Note: sorry that the widget was down and not work any more due to a new Twitter API.

If you are finding a highlight solution to display your most recent Twitter updates on your DNN website, the "Twitter Feed widget" module will be exactly what you need. With the free widget, it is easy to integrate the twitter feed into the sidebar of dnn blog to show your latest tweets.

Out of the box, you just need to specify the public twitter account info (username) and this dnn widget will do the rest for you. Moreover, you can control how tweets are displayed from widget settings panel, such as Number of displayed Tweets & whether to Show Replies. The cache mechanism also let your dnn website avoid critical website load traffic.

Today we would like to release the important fixed version 4.7.2 for Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke, which included urgent  fixes , such as exception "attempted to divide by zero" threw  when adding module into page and it raised in the community forum here - Divide by Zero Error. Also we enhanced Content Slider Widget with ability to support customized property value of the dnn core profile for Author entity in the CSW, like [AUTHOR:Website]. Importantly we supplied a new solution to avoid multiple jQuery conflict issue when other modules also included jQuery framework and fixed threaded comments broken in the "_default" theme.  As usual, the complete details for all of the changes can be found in the Release Notes.

More exciting is that the next generation of SunBlogNuke v5+ have been on road, which will be done with DNN6 release available. It will take advantage of all the benefits of the latest dnn core framework. So here we announced that the upcoming v5.0 will not support dnn4 any more because it will utilize lots of core APIs introduced from DNN5+, such as Taxonomy. You don’t have to be worry if you are still using the dnn4. Meanwhile we will also maintain the older version 4.x compatible with dnn4.  Please stay tune :)

Major Highlights in v4.7.2:

• ENH - Supported customized property value of the dnn core profile for Author entity in the CSW, like [AUTHOR:Website].
• ENH - Added auto-ping service for trackback requests.
• ENH - Excluded handlers from web.config, which introduced lots of problems with complex dnn environment.
• FIX - Multiple jQuery conflict issue when other modules also included jQuery framework.
• FIX - Threw exception (attempted to divide by zero) when adding module into page.
• FIX - Threaded comments broken in the "_default' theme.
• FIX - Datetime token tags, such as 'PublishedDate', not resolved correctly in the CSW.
• FIX - 'Alternate Feed Url' meta tag not show.
• Lots of fixes & customizations.

NOTE: As with any release, we recommend you perform a complete file and database backup before performing any upgrade on a production website and that you first conduct a trial upgrade on a staging version of the site. Following these guidelines will ensure that you are able to recover should any unforeseen problems arise during the upgrade process.

Note that some issues may occur if your original version of SunBlogNuke is lower version, like 3.x, and you've developed your customized theme. Please refer to the tutorial - Must-Read Note for SunBlogNuke v4.x and follow the instructions. Hope it makes sense.

You can get it here. Blog your way and enjoy life. :)

The SunBlogNuke Team

Starting with SunBlogNuke version 3.6.0, the blogging module full supports for dnn core token replace functionality that allows you to use replacement tokens inside your template of widgets like Content Slider Widget. This new feature provides a MUCH needed enhancement to the Ultimate DNN Blog Module - SunBlogNuke. You will find it very helpful and very powerful because you are able to completely customize their own different view from the available data. Today I am taking the time here to give you a brief overview of this awesome function.

The vast amount of cool customizations maybe one of the reasons why people choose Ultimate DNN Blog Module - SunBlogNuke instead of using other blog services basing on DotNetNuke platform. Today what I would like to show you one of those cool things is tag cloud widget.