SunBlogNuke - DotNetNuke Blog Module

Actually the vote/digg feature, which allows registered users to vote for your blog posts, was supported from Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke v4.0 but it is not active in default. It requires some customizations to integrate with. Today we would like to share you how to apply the awesome feature into your dnn blog.  Firstly we will introduce the basic sample with built-in feature, then extend to supply the advanced usage with developing a new vote widget and customized  styles.

In our previous posts on Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke hacks, we discussed the incredible flexibility of  SunBlogNuke, which is one of the biggest reasons for its popularity among bloggers worldwide. In particular, from v4.0 we introduced the custom fields feature, which let users create variables and add custom values to them, are  one of the reasons for SunBlogNuke’ flexibility and endless possibilities.

In this tutorial, we will compile a list of useful things that you can do with custom fields in SunBlogNuke (if you are not heard of custom fields feature please refer to the initial guideline firstly - Extend DNN Blog With Custom Fields). Among them are re-defining the <title> tag of every post and linking to external resources instead of the blog post.

I hope everyone is having a good weekend! Today we are glad that the refactored release v4.1 for for Ultimate DotNetNuke blog module – SunBlogNuke is available for free upgrade. This release contains some requested features, such as extending new fields [PublishedDate] & [LastModifiedBy] in the post entity so now it totally supported the necessary fields - CreatedOn, CreatedBy, LastModifiedOn, LastModifiedBy and PublishedOn, which you can access in the theme view template as well as tokens in the Content Slider Widget. Also it enhanced custom field feature in the Content Slider Widget with extending new tokens {block:customfield:xxx} and {else}, with which you will can configure default value for some specific custom fields if they are null or empty (Please refer to the updated tutorial - Extend DNN Blog With Custom Fields). In the last we would like to thank our client Guido A LOT because their team contributed the Italian language resource package, which will make our module easily friendly. As usual, the complete details for all of the changes can be found in the Release Notes.

Major Highlights in v4.4:

• ENH - Supported new fields [PublishedDate] & [LastModifiedBy] in the post entity.
• ENH - Supported new tokens {block:customfield:xxx} and {else} in the Content Slider Widget.
• ENH - Enhanced the Disqus integration.
• ENH - Enhanced search result view.
• ENH - Released the additional language resource packages - Spanish & Italian.
• Lots of other fixes & enhancements.

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

From DNN 5.x, our website also began to use RadEditor as html provider for rich text editor, such as writing a post for our Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke. Recently our clients noticed the issue that when typing characters in the Greek language it converts them to their html entities but not insert the actual unicode characters. For example, the sentence "Για να δουμε πως πα?ζει Ελληνικ?" will render "<p>&Gamma;&iota;&alpha; &nu;&alpha; &delta;&omicron;&upsilon;&mu;&epsilon; &pi;&omega;&sigmaf; &pi;&alpha;?&zeta;&epsilon;&iota; &Epsilon;&lambda;&lambda;&eta;&nu;&iota;&kappa;?</p>" in the HTML mode. With looking into the issue and request help in Telerik forum, we finally know that it is because the latest version of RadEditor included a new content filter named ConvertCharactersToEntities, which converts the special characters to entities, such as converts the Greek symbols to entities. In order to fix it, please open the configuration file and remove the ConvertCharactersToEntities string from the ContentFilters enum values, like that below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <property name="Skin">Default</property>
  <property name="AutoResizeHeight">True</property>
  <property name="ContentFilters">RemoveScripts,EncodeScripts,FixUlBoldItalic,FixEnclosingP,IECleanAnchors,MozEmStrong,
  ConvertFontToSpan,OptimizeSpans,ConvertToXhtml,IndentHTMLContent</property>
  ....
</configuration>

Hope it helps for somebody who encountered the same issue. :) Thanks again for Rumen and the Telerik team.

Refer to the original post mentioned the issue originally: RadEditor converting Greek characters to their html entities!