DotNetNuke 4.5 Released - Are you ready to upgrade?
DotNetNuke recently announced the much anticipated release of v4.5. Besides being a very stable release, the version also includes many new bells and whistles for your portal. We encourage you to check it out and don't worry, all Data Springs, Inc. modules have been tested and work with the release. Lets examine just a few of the new features…
Setup Wizard:
Each time you install DotNetNuke you will now be given the opportunity to use an installation wizard. This is great for; testing your database connection and setting up your portal configuration, verifying your installation folder permissions are setup correctly BEFORE the installation, and even better, the ability to choose which template and out of the box modules you would like setup from a friendly interface. Joe Brinkman from DotNetNuke has posted full details of the new wizard including a video demonstration here. We have also included screenshots of the wizard during the DotNetNuke 4.5 Installation Wizard.
Considering upgrading your existing DNN release? The wizard is not needed or displayed for upgrading your DNN installation; however make sure to back up your system and web.config before the upgrade.
The following is an example screenshot representing an upgrade from 4.4.1.
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 Tip: Did you know that you can now install skins easily from the initial installation? Just include the skin, in the folder under DotNetNuke\Install\Skin
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Text / HTML Module Enhancements:
Ever get frustrated working with the inline editor? If so you won't need to worry anymore since 4.5 introduces a new AJAX toolbar for the standard out of the box Text/HTML Module. Now you can click the edit icon and get full GUI toolbar support for your rich text editor. Don’t worry if you mess up the text, there is now a ‘Cancel’ and ‘Save’ within the toolbar.
Besides adding several enhancements to the text / html module, DotNetNuke 4.5 also includes many new enhancements to the default DotNetNuke Text Editor. This includes the ability to set the default settings for the text editor per instance, module, and portal. Settings include the ability to change the settings such as the editor skin(s), available styles, toolbar view options, and much more. Look for future articles directly related to these enhancements.
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Tip: As displayed in the below screenshot, if you want to remove the ability to edit text directly within the module container you can set this up under Admin, Site Settings, Advanced Settings, Usability Settings.
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Other fun stuff:
Although we don't have time to list all of the available enhancements to 4.5, I wanted to outline just a few other useful features: .
- Wouldn’t it be great if you could give a specific user permissions without having to create a completely new security role or add that user to an existing role? Now you can!
Setup specific permissions for page
Setup specific permissions for module:
- Ever sign out of your admin account just to see what the end user sees? You don't have to anymore!
There is a new enhancement added to 4.5 which allows you to change your current view from 'View' or 'Edit'.
Installing AJAX:
We recommend downloading and installting the AJAX extensions from Microsoft. The download/framework is free and although not required for DotNetNuke 4.5 we highly recommend it to take advantage of many new AJAX only features. You can get full details on downloading the AJAX Framework.
Our review? - 5 STARS!
DotNetNuke 4.5 added the bells and whistles to the framework interface that bring it up to speed (and beyond) with ASP.NET 2.0, AJAX, and feature-rich usability. If you are familiar with the 4.4 release of DNN you already know the performance has improved significantly compared to previous versions. Now add the interface with your performance, and you truly have one great portal. From a company that works with many different portal platforms (Oracle, SharePoint 2007, DotNetNuke), we would definitely recommend this enhanced DotNetNuke release for almost all of our customers implementations.