One problem that is facing you from time to time as a dotnetnuke professional is the burning desire of customers to have a single sign-on solution for their multi-portal system. Often they have different portals for their company departments or separate intranet and internet portals or some other multiportal needs. But none of these customers understand the necessity of logging seperatly into every single portal! And for the system administrators it is a nightmare to keep all these user accounts in sync!  A lot of commercial and open source modules and providers helped to solve this problem in the past.

Another annoyance is the impossibility to share content between portals. Think of  a desktop browser website and his mobile companion (realized as two portals). If you write an article in the desktop portal and you want to show this special article on the mobile portal too, what did you have to do ? Yes, copy and paste! Possible, but not very elegant!

Since Version 6.1  of DotNetNuke  there is a solution for this in the Proffessional Version (PE). Unfortunately this is supposed to be not included in the community edition of DNN.  But you should know that the functionality is implemented in the core and only the administration module is lacking in the CE version! So you are able to use this, even in  CE, with minimal changes directly in the database. This blog shows you how to do so!

While converting the data access layer for the DNN FAQ module, I came across some pitfalls. There is some documentation on the internet, but this remains more on the surface. And moreover, the datalayer is still missing an important part in the implementation (more on that later). So this document should help you people not making the same mistakes as I did when going my first steps with DAL 2.

There are a lot of reasons to have a copy of your live site locally. Perhaps you want to test an update of DNN or a module before running it on the live site. Or you are a module developer and on a customers site there is an error which you need to debug and no Visual Studio is installed on the webserver ( no good idea to set a breakpoint on a live running website ;-) ). But to accomplish this you have to do a lot of many many many tasks. If you host 20 customer websites, a new DNN update means a lot of work to test. See how this can be done with 2 powershell scripts in no time!

I am now in the situation to convert the DNN FAQs module to DNN 6. The first thing to do is to implement the new form pattern from DNN 6. I looked around in the internet to find some resources which help with that and found a video from Ian Robertson in the DNN Wiki and some blog posts but no document where everything is documented together . So I decided to put that information together in a blog post

Today I released my first project on CodePlex: http://bbimagehandler.codeplex.com

The BBImageHandler for DotNetNuke and ASP.NET gives users and module programmers the opportunity to use a handler that displays resized images, adds watermarks to images, creates thumbnails of web pages or displays images stored in a database table without storing them to harddisk. Additionally it could be used to create a counter display.