Securing the login of your DotNetNuke site is very important, but often neglected for the wrong reasons. It shouldn’t be because SSL adds a performance overhead to your site. It shouldn’t be because SSL certificates are expensive either. But most of all, it should not be because it is hard!

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One of the lesser known, but very powerful template options of the DotNetNuke DDR Menu, originally created by Mark Allan, is Razor. A while back, Joe Brinkman had a very interesting blog post, combining razor templating with taxonomy to come to very advanced menu layouts. Sadly, DotNetNuke 7.0 introduced a breaking change in the way Razor was supported that specifically impacted the DDR Menu implementation of it. Although the issue had been on our radar for some time, it was not a very easy one to fix… Well.. the wait is over, in DotNetNuke 7.0.4, this is finally fixed.

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Sometimes it is very hard to troubleshoot SMTP issues that occur with your DotNetNuke application. Sure, you can view the SMTP log of your mail server, but that may be either misconfigured, or not even accessible at all (this is especially true in a shared hosting environment).

Luckily, there is a very simple way to enable logging for all network traffic DotNetNuke is generating, which includes SMTP traffic.

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Creating a good module makes it sometimes very hard to improve upon that. The (still current) old release of the DotNetNuke Announcements module was such a module. Created in an era long forgotten, as a DotNetNuke 4 module, it was quite good at the time when it was released. The announcement module is a fairly simple module that is a useful tool on most websites, while at the same time showcasing important DotNetNuke API features, and thus playing also a role in helping developers understand DotNetNuke module development.

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A long time ago I blogged about the caching enhancements in DotNetNuke 5, and a recent blog post by Mitchel Sellers about using DotNetNuke Caching in Custom Modules triggered me into revisiting my old post.

In his excellent post, Mitchel describes a way to abstract from some of the available methods in the DotNetNuke .Common.Utilities.Datacache class. This is indeed a great way to simplify using the DotNetNuke entity cache in your own modules.

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