Products

Solutions

Resources

Partners

Community

Blog

About

QA

Ideas Test

New Community Website

Ordinarily, you'd be at the right spot, but we've recently launched a brand new community website... For the community, by the community.

Yay... Take Me to the Community!

Welcome to the DNN Community Forums, your preferred source of online community support for all things related to DNN.
In order to participate you must be a registered DNNizen

HomeHomeDNN Open Source...DNN Open Source...Module ForumsModule ForumsBlogBlogConfiguration Questions/Feature RequestConfiguration Questions/Feature Request
Previous
 
Next
New Post
10/26/2008 8:16 PM
 

Greetings all.  I am a new DNN user and am currently configuring my blog.  I have some questions and/or feature requests:

I guess the sweeping question is, can any of the following already be done, and I'm just missing it? 

  • Make page title include title of the blog entry
  • Categorize
  • Generate a 'slug,' a direct URL that contains the title of the blog, for search engine optimization
  • Tagging, tag clouds, etc. - I have seen some mentions of this possibility, but it doesn't seem to be implemented yet except as a paid addon-module for the entire DNN engine.

I realize that DNN is a full content management system, as opposed to just a blog engine.  Unfortunately, it seems that things like page naming are not particularly well integrated for search engine optimization - my url www.lowgenius.com/Hey-Im-Using-DotNetNuke-Now.aspx is going to return better results than something like www.lowgenius.com/Blog/tabid/78/EntryID/1/Default.aspx (this is actually a flaw with the entire DNN system, in my opinion - you should be able to generate short URLs with relevant names...but perhaps this is a trick that I haven't found yet). 

With the additional hit taken from lack of categorization and tagging mechanisms, I'm really wondering if I wouldn't be better off installing BlogEngine.Net in a subdirectory and using that to manage my blog entries (or just redirecting the blog 'page' on my business site to the existing blogengine, perhaps with pre-selected category, at my personal site.

I'm definitely excited about getting to know DNN, it's an incredibly versatile CMS that will allow me to quickly create attractive, easy-to-use, and easy-to-manage client sites, and I full intend to leverage it in my web design business...but this particular module is problematic in lacking these features.  Taking the page title issue, for instance, I use the AddToAny social bookmarking tool on my BlogEngine, and whenever it Diggs or Deliciouses or Reddits or Buzzes a blog entry, the page title shows up as "LowGenius | Article Title."  When I use the same tool to bookmark an entry in my DNN blog, it just titles as "[Name Of The Blog]."  This makes it more complicated for visitors to bookmark and share my blog entries, which negatively impacts my ability to leverage social bookmarking to drive traffic.

And so on.

If I'm just missing something, please feel free to tell me - I'm very new to DNN, I certainly don't know my way around it yet, and I like to think I can handle constructive criticism.

Any help will be appreciated.  For an example of the sorts of things I'm talking about, please feel free to take a look at my BlogEngine-based site at www.lowgenius.net and compare how that handles to the way DNN handles.

 
New Post
10/27/2008 12:39 AM
 

LowGenius wrote
 

Greetings all.  I am a new DNN user and am currently configuring my blog.  I have some questions and/or feature requests:

I guess the sweeping question is, can any of the following already be done, and I'm just missing it? 

  • Make page title include title of the blog entry
  • Categorize
  • Generate a 'slug,' a direct URL that contains the title of the blog, for search engine optimization
  • Tagging, tag clouds, etc. - I have seen some mentions of this possibility, but it doesn't seem to be implemented yet except as a paid addon-module for the entire DNN engine.

For blog entry to change the title of the page, please see this thread http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/92/threadid/239972/scope/posts/Default.aspx 

Currently the only way to categorize something is to create a child blog by that name (as far as I know)

The current blog module does not support title  in the URL. From what I hear the next version 3.05 which is scheduled to release very soon has this feature.

Tag clouds etc are available as paid modules for DNN as a whole. However, I haven't come across anything for Blog module itself.

 

With the additional hit taken from lack of categorization and tagging mechanisms, I'm really wondering if I wouldn't be better off installing BlogEngine.Net in a subdirectory and using that to manage my blog entries (or just redirecting the blog 'page' on my business site to the existing blogengine, perhaps with pre-selected category, at my personal site.

I'm definitely excited about getting to know DNN, it's an incredibly versatile CMS that will allow me to quickly create attractive, easy-to-use, and easy-to-manage client sites, and I full intend to leverage it in my web design business...but this particular module is problematic in lacking these features.  Taking the page title issue, for instance, I use the AddToAny social bookmarking tool on my BlogEngine, and whenever it Diggs or Deliciouses or Reddits or Buzzes a blog entry, the page title shows up as "LowGenius | Article Title."  When I use the same tool to bookmark an entry in my DNN blog, it just titles as "[Name Of The Blog]."  This makes it more complicated for visitors to bookmark and share my blog entries, which negatively impacts my ability to leverage social bookmarking to drive traffic.

And so on.

If I'm just missing something, please feel free to tell me - I'm very new to DNN, I certainly don't know my way around it yet, and I like to think I can handle constructive criticism.

Any help will be appreciated.  For an example of the sorts of things I'm talking about, please feel free to take a look at my BlogEngine-based site at www.lowgenius.net and compare how that handles to the way DNN handles.

I understand and agree with your frustation about not being able to tag or categorize content. The blog module has kinda lagged behind but as far as I understand, with the impending release of 3.05, there should not be much to complain about. The Blog team is absolutely gung-ho about adding more features and if time permits, we should be able to see many more features packed into the Blog module.

Whether to go with BlogEngine.NET or not is entirely your decision; I for one have realized that DNN makes things so much easier despite the shortcomings in various sections which, given enough time can get sorted quickly. On my website, www.subodh.com , you'd probably see the Blog module at its best, I cannot complain and frankly, even though I paid for the tag clouds and other such modules, I realized I'd rather wait off until Blog module supports it inherently. Of course if I lose my patience, the source code is always there for anybody to build on to.

 
New Post
10/27/2008 1:51 AM
 

Hey, thanks very much for your response, Subodh.  I fully intend to stick with DNN as a CMS, as I NEED a CMS, and in the case of my business site, the Blog functionality is a secondary consideration.  Just to clarify, the choice isn't whether to keep or dump DNN entirely, just whether I'd be better off keeping my blog activity in my other, BE-driven site until the blog functionality is more robust in DNN.

I have to shame-facedly confess that I am nowhere near ready to start trying to code my own raw ASPX.  I have some high-priority gigs I'm working on right now; once that load settles a bit, I'll likely throw both DNN and BE up on test domains and start breaking them to learn.

The big sticker for me right now was the article-name-as-page-title thing.  I'm going to try out the VERY helpful link you sent and roll with that fix for now, use that for my 'professional' blogging, and we'll see what the next patch looks like.  Hopefully the 'slug' system will be implemented as well - I know that page name has a direct effect on optimization for Google, and a page with keywords in the name and a 'friendly' URL will get much more action than a long series of numbers and backslashes.

Hopefully at some point I'll get my head around this thing well enough to start making useful contributions :)

Thanks again for your help, and I'm always open to more suggestions or information!

-jh

 
Previous
 
Next
HomeHomeDNN Open Source...DNN Open Source...Module ForumsModule ForumsBlogBlogConfiguration Questions/Feature RequestConfiguration Questions/Feature Request


These Forums are dedicated to discussion of DNN Platform and Evoq Solutions.

For the benefit of the community and to protect the integrity of the ecosystem, please observe the following posting guidelines:

  1. No Advertising. This includes promotion of commercial and non-commercial products or services which are not directly related to DNN.
  2. No vendor trolling / poaching. If someone posts about a vendor issue, allow the vendor or other customers to respond. Any post that looks like trolling / poaching will be removed.
  3. Discussion or promotion of DNN Platform product releases under a different brand name are strictly prohibited.
  4. No Flaming or Trolling.
  5. No Profanity, Racism, or Prejudice.
  6. Site Moderators have the final word on approving / removing a thread or post or comment.
  7. English language posting only, please.
What is Liquid Content?
Find Out
What is Liquid Content?
Find Out
What is Liquid Content?
Find Out