Thought I should share this subjective summary from my blog.

Core news:

The 9th of february DotNetNuke membership passed 250.000 persons!

That is a quarter of a million people, making the future of DotNetNuke ever more secure and each adding their needs and know-how to the DotNetNuke mix.

The Core Repository module version 3.1.8 was released about a week ago (we are already using it on our DNN Websites Directory). A great new version which made it possible to customized the dialog for adding a website / item and also to view custom attributes for each entry in the directory.  Localization is also possible even for templated labels and the templating system is excellent. There is a bug: when changing the sort order and selecting an item to rate or visit the module selects the wrong item. I hope this will be fixed in a "mars release" - the team are mostly working on documentation in this release.

A great thank you from us at FaktNet to Steve Fabian and his team for developing this great core module!

It can really be used in a lot of scenarios (on another site I use it as a business directory with the business card skin).

The long awaited Core Store released a beta on 1st of february and already there is a live site the module at:
http://www.just6degrees.com/
I have not had a chance to look at the beta yet, but it is great to see this module taking a big step forward.

DotNetNuke January Newsletter w/message from Shaun, this about the next version of DNN:

"I am pleased to announce that work on the next major product release is well underway. The focus of this release is on the refactoring of the Membership, Roles, and Profile services - the foundation of the DotNetNuke web application framework. Our early adoption of the ASP.NET 2.0 versions of these providers reaped some tremendous rewards for the project, but also provided the opportunity for us to identify their limitations. In order for us to deliver some of the enhancements requested by the community, we need to extend the functionality of these providers quite significantly. Taking a lesson from Microsoft, our goal is to provide a set of extensible APIs which satisfy the specific business requirements of the DotNetNuke application. Long anticipated features such as a run-time extensible searchable Profile, enriched Role management, and advanced Membership security management will be delivered in this iteration."

3rd party modules:

UCanUse has released User Attributes 2.7 with a functional usermanager and View Mode as a first step towards their upcoming User Profile module that integrates with User Attributes which will not be long to follow. We are using this module on a site to collect extra information and automatically assigning users and redirects based on that custom information.

DNNJungle has released a new version of the excellent InfoMap module, this time with a provider model that shall make it possible for developers to provide their own custom data and have the infomap module visualize it. I have made a test of this new version on the website for a Hotel and it is now possible to have different icons on the map for different items. I plan to use this to visualize resources so travellers can see where are the restaurants, bus stations, travel agents etc. (it is a small town in Peru so no Google Maps coverage).

Swirl AJAX Chatroom 1.6 version was released with support for localization and each user can pick their color. This module works great and is a nice addition to a special interest website, a family website or as support chat for a business.

Activemodules has released Mail Connector version 1.0 for Active Forums making it possible to interact with a forum via email. I have tested the module at the demo portal demo.activemodules.com and found some "bugs", but it looks promising for a 1.0 release and Will & co makes quality stuff. Activemodules has also released a new product "Active Cases" which I have not had time to look at.

DotNetPark has released a Community Preview Release of their soon to be official "DotNetPanel" which is a hosting platform developed and integrated with DotNetNuke. Imagine something like Plesk or Ensim only that the user interface are DNN modules and can be integrated in your Portal. We hope the official product proves solid and that features are added continuosly. I think the concept is brilliant and hope people will support this DNN integrated Hosting panel, the website is www.dotnetpanel.com.

DNN Skins:

Nina Meiers has released a new free skin at www.xd.com.au

Akrion has released a free CSS only skin at www.akrion.net

Major skin developers with new commercial skins this month are: akrion.net, SalarO.com, Rhoek.com and SkinArt. Most template commercial skins can be previewed at the DNN Skins Gallery on www.faktnet.com (when returning just check out the "New Skins" Album).

Events:

20th january we announced the DotNetNuke Websites Directory with 188 websites. The aim is to be a resource for the community so that people can easily see what others have done with DNN and get inspiration for their own websites. Today we have 380 websites in the Directory. If you know any cool or inspirational DNN based websites please use the feedback form on our site or register as user and add website to the Directory yourself.

13th february there was a webcast on VBNetExperts if you didn't watch it you can find the slides at their site: http://www.vbnetexpert.com/Default.aspx?tabid=32

Philip Beadle blogged about an issue with web farms and DNN4 with separate file server and told about a new Great DNN based website for The National Rugby League in Australia:

We built the www.nrl.com site on DNN 4 with 3 web servers a clustered file server and clustered SQL boxes.  (The site does 17 million pages a month)  We ran into some permissions issues with using the separate file server which houses all of the files needed to run DNN.  See his post on dotnetnuke.com for the fix to this issue.

Thats it folks - my subjective summary of events in the DotNetNuke universe the last month.

Regards,
Paul