SunBlogNuke - DotNetNuke Blog Module

Well, let us get started to fight DNN Bugs again. This is the second post we discussed about DNN bugs and share workarounds with you. The first post is Fighting DNN Bugs: All Handlers Not Work, which you also are interested in reading.

It is so tired and uninteresting process but we we have to deal with them for our websites or clients if they requested. DotNetNuke is indeed the most excellent/great CMS at the first look but when going ahead, there are lots of issues/bugs to challenge your ability and patience. One of our client ever complained that there were lots of error filled in the event logs of their websites, and mainly indicated that "Object reference not set to an instance of an object". You look, so little information is not enough to investigate those issues and identify the problem that we can do nothing excerpt clearing the event logs to make us feel happy for a while. Yes, the community version is free however that is the big price when issues occurred. Some times we can look for helps in the silent forum but most times we have to fix them ourselves.

More frustrating things are that some bugs exists cross two major versions,  such as DNN6-DNN7 and still not fixed now even though they are created into issue tracker.  Well, if they are ignored with the official guys, let us check them out and address some workaround to fix them forever or temporarily.

Today we would like to share the bug is about Google Analytics Tracking. From DNN v6.0, the core package included the built-in module for Google Analytics Tracking. It looks indeed an awesome thing for us because we don’t have to trick these coding in the skin from the scratch. However, sarcastically one day we would like to disable the Google Analytics with some reasons, DNN only said NO WAY :(

How to reproduce this bug:

1. Go to Admin/Google Analytics page.
2. Fill in any value into the tracking ID field
3. Click to update and make it active. Everything looks nice :)
4. Again when I filled the empty value for tracking ID and hope that it should be inactive, the simple form just said that the field is required and can’t be empty. 
5. Try to update, failure, update, failure… Nothing can’t be done any more and Google Analytics tracking coding always showed in every page.

How to fix it

Currently there seem to be some workarounds as follows:

1) Go to your site's root folder and find the siteanalytics.config file, COMMENT OUT or DELETE everything inside the CDATA tag.

2) Analytics settings are stored in file GoogleAnalytics.config, residing in portal root directory, such as portals/x/subdir(x is the portal id). Deleting the file will erase your settings.

3) Go to the folder $ROOT/DesktopModules/Admin/Analytics and find the GoogleAnalyticsSettings.ascx file. COMMENT OUT or DELETE the RequiredFieldValidator.

The 3) way is the one what I recommend and will fix all the issues – you don’t have to check out all the portals but the disadvantage is to be overwritten in the next upgrade. As the point of DNN module developer, it is meaningless to make this tracking id mandatory.

If you have any question or thoughts about this topic, please feel free share it in the comment. Thanks.

Resources links discussed the same issue above:

Can't Remove Google Analytics Tracking

Removing Google Analytics from your DNN site

Other issues addressed about DNN7 you may interested in:

After upgrading to DNN 7.1.2 Site Settings doesn't work

After upgrading to DNN 7.1 OpenSearch and DNN Preview Search doesn't work

Change the Space character in Advanced URLs with DNN 7.1

After the acquisition of Active Modules by DNN (formerly DotNetNuke) Corp, the position of original Forum module had been replaced by the Active Forums Module and the status of development looks stopping currently. No any updates or activity – in my opinion, it will be dead in the end later. Unfortunately, some our websites are still building by DNN Forum Module and we don’t want to switch it to Active Forums Module because its features are enough for us and changing will be a potential risk with time or more works.

Actually it may be a great opportunity to get started a totally new/customized project for DNN Forum. We just want to make it live always and are able to add new features or enhance some pending issues. Well, let us get ahead. We will launch the customized forum project in GitHub(DNN Core Framework had been moved to GitHub, as share in this post DNN Nightly Builds) and it will be Open Source Project always there.

Highlights in the initially building:

• Added new theme called "FlatBlue" and made it as default theme.
• Removed multiple post view and only thread detail view without paging.
• Supported quick reply with Markdown format,
• Clean UI/coding optimization, such as removing unnecessary table/tr/td tags.
• Supported relative time to make it look friendly.
• Fixed avatar issue when current user without any specific profile avatar - never upload it.
• Fixed issue where meta description with line or whitespace.

You can take a look at how it action here – Forum Community for SunBlogNuke.

All right, if you want to have any thoughts about this topics, such as advices about this behavior, sponsor us with buying coffee for us, please feel free to let us know. Thanks a lot.

What is DNN Forum Project?

DotNetNuke® Forum is a full featured module used for managing forums and email notification of posts on your DNN site.

DotNetNuke® Forum in CodePlex

Ever Official website of DotNetNuke Forum Project

After integration SunBlogNuke with Window Live Writer, you may wonder where to find or what to replace the excerpt field in the built-in edit post panel. There is one elegant workaround – using the <!--more--> tag to mark the end of the excerpt. Fortunately, there is a setting property called "supportsExtendedEntries" in the wlwmanifest.xml depending on the feature. Please note that setting this value to true will allow the <!--more--> tag in your Window Live Writer. 

What you need to accomplish is placing your cursor where you want the “Read More” tag and selecting “Split Post” from the “Format” menu. Then the collection page and simple entry partial will be modified to have a "Read More" link whenever there is extended content. Have  a look at the screenshot as follows:

Also you can see the more features integrated with WLW, for example, keyword, category and slug etc. :)

Yesterday I encountered one strange behavior on DNN 6.2.9 -   DNN Mega menu dropdown is only visible to work when I login with admin/host account but the registered users doesn't see it. In the first looks, it should be caused by some jQuery plugin not registered correctly. After investigation a while, we found that the jQuery hoverIntent is the problem and we have to manually register it in our skin in default. Some code snippets below looks helpful:

 <script runat="server">
    protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e)
    {
      DotNetNuke.Framework.jQuery.RequestRegistration();
      
      if(!Request.IsAuthenticated)
      {
         var scriptPath = ResolveUrl("~/Resources/Shared/Scripts/jquery/jquery.hoverIntent.min.js");
         //for mega menu we need to register hoverIntent plugin, but avoid duplicate registrations 
         Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptInclude("hoverintent", scriptPath); 
      }
      
      base.OnInit(e);
    }
 </script>

However, there is an elegant workaround to fix this issue – the core jQuery skin object is your better choice. 

<%@ Register TagPrefix="dnn" TagName="JQUERY" Src="~/Admin/Skins/jQuery.ascx" %>
<dnn:JQUERY ID="dnnjQuery" jQueryHoverIntent="true" runat="server" />

The following properties for the skin object can be set to True/False (False by default):

• DnnjQueryPlugins - If true, the dnn plugins used for panels and tabs will be loaded in addition to jQuery and jQueryUI.
• jQueryHoverIntent - If true, the HoverIntent script used for tooltips will be loaded in addition to jQuery.
• jQueryUI - If true, jQueryUI will be loaded in addition to jQuery.

Resources links:

Reusable DotNetNuke jQuery Plugins

http://www.dnnsoftware.com/wiki/Page/jQuery

As you know, currently DNN is growing bigger than what you expected and the latest version is 7.2 building with lots of awesome features. However, in my opinion, we encountered more and more problems in the same time – tons of versions with tons of existing bugs to be fixed. More frustrating things are that some bugs exists cross DNN4-DNN7 and still not fixed now even though they are created into issue tracker.  Well, if they are ignored with the official guys, let us check them out and address some workaround to fix them forever or temporarily. Today we get started to build a series of posts and share how we fighting DNN bugs these years :(