From time-to-time we have the requirement that we need to change all of the permissions on all of our DNN pages.  This can be a real pain, going through each page, and changing the permissions one by one. 

However, there is a shortcut to this that you may or may not know about.   This shortcut allows you to copy the permissions from a parent page to all of the child pages under the parent.   This can save you a ton of time and it is easy to do.

1. Navigate to the page whose child you want to change all of the permissions on.
2. Go to the page settings for the page.
3. Under permssions click on the button "Copy Permissions"
   

Dotnetnuke allows you to create your own customize profile fields for your users.  One of the Data Types that is available to you when you create a new profile property field is the type of List.

To use the list data type you need to do the following:

1. Login as a user with Host level access.
2. Go to Host and then click on Lists in the Menu.
3. Create a new list and be sure to name the list the same name as you want the list of Items to appear in the profile form.  For example I have a list named "Salutation" which has such items as Mr. Mrs. Dr. etc.
4. Create a new profile field under the User Accounts and name the profile field exactly as you named your list you created.  aka Salutation.
5. Now when you fill out the profile form you will see a dropdownlist of the values in the list you created.

 

Alot of people ask how can I change x, y, z?  Anyway, this is really simple.

Nearly all of Dotnetnuke allows for the changing of emails, words, sentences, labels, etc.

You can make changes in two places.

1. Under the Admin Menu, click on Languages, and then click Language Editor.

2. Under the Host Menu, click on Languages, and then click the Language Editor

Happy Editing

You can secure folders via roles but, that only works within the context of DNN.  For instance if we had a folderd called Hilbert and in that folder was a zip file called Stuart.zip and I specified that only the Registrered users role could access the folder, then from within DNN only registered users could access the folder.

However, that doesn't prevent someone who isn't logged into DNN from browsing to the folder and accessing the file directly.

When you create a DNN Secure folder what DNN does is add ".resource" to the end of the file name.  This secures the file because IIS will not serve up files with .resource file type.

The third option you have is storing the file within the Database, but this also adds the .resource to the file.

I have a current project that requires that when a user goes to retrieve a password through the "Forgot Password" feature they must be challenged with a Question and an Answer they supply.

In theory DNN supports this sort of setup which you enable via the Web.config key that looks like this "requiresQuestionAndAnswer".

Letl me outline why you shouln't use this feature right now.

1. If you are an admin you cannot create a new user because the Admin user creation process throws an error regarding the lacking of a passwordQuestion.

2. If you are an admin you cannot change a users password because the lack of a passwordQuestion.

3. I can't quite remember, but I think that you cannot register a user through the registration process because of the Question and Answer feature.   I know I am using the DataSpring User registration module for some reason, but it has been a while and I don't have my notes in front of me.

The good news is that DNN reports that the Question/Answer...

There are a few things you can do to achieve this.  If you create a user on a child site that exists on the parent site, then you need to create a user with the exact same username and passwordas the one on the parent.  This will make the user exists on both sites. 

Another option would be to add any user that needs to exist on both sites into the UserPortals table.   The UserPortals table associates a UserID with the portal the user has access to.   If you have a few select users that need to work across portals then you could add entries in the UserPortals table for those users.

The third option is a third party module that allows you to share users across portals.

I have used DnnMasters.com User Sharing Extreme to do this.  It allows for the sharing of users and roles across portals and sound like something you are wanting.

I think DataSprings.com offers a User Login module that will also allows users from one portal to login to another.

...

Dotnetnuke stores a users information in several different tables and it can be hard sometimes to get that piece of information you want.

Someone recently asked in the forums for a way to tie the results entered by users from the Survey module to the users information.   The only piece of information they had from the user was the UserID.  I cooked up this query quickly as a road map to get them going.

SELECT     SurveyResults.SurveyResultID, SurveyResults.SurveyOptionID, SurveyResults.UserID, Users.Username, Users.FirstName, Users.LastName,                       aspnet_Membership.Email FROM         SurveyResults LEFT OUTER JOIN                       Users ON SurveyResults.UserID = Users.UserID INNER JOIN                       aspnet_Users ON Users.Username = aspnet_Users.UserName INNER JOIN                       aspnet_Membership ON aspnet_Users.UserId = aspnet_Membership.UserId

You can see the complete thread here.

I blogged a few hours ago regarding how I was having issues with SQL Server Express 2008 and not having the Management Studio install.

I finally worked it out.  I was trying to add addtional features to my existing instance of SQL Server 2008 that was previously created when I installed Web Developer Express 2008.  

I finally decided to just install a new instance of SQL Server Express 2008 and just named is SQLExpress2 and viola, I then had the option to install the Management Studio.

I also at first was trying to use the install for SQL Server Express with Tools and I bumped up to SQL Server Express Advance.  I don't think I needed express but whatever.  At least I can access my databases again.

The joys of new technology!

I have been fighting with SQL Express 2008 all day today.  I installed it last week with Visual Web Developer Express 2008.   The instal process upgraded my SQL Server 2005 instance to a SQL Server 2008 Instace, I really didn't want that, but okay, no problem.  

The issue is that when I reinstall SQL Server 2008 I am not getting the option to install SQL Management Tool 2008, whcih you need in order to manage the SQL site.  

When I get this worked out I will let you know what I found out during the process.

 

UPDATE:

I got it fixed http://www.hilbertsolutions.com/Blog/tabid/60/EntryID/20/Default.aspx

I needed to display the current page's title from within a module.  I dug a bit but didn't see the exact code so I ended up working it out myself.

Here is the code I used;

lblPageOn.Text = DotNetNuke.Entities.Portals.PortalController.GetCurrentPortalSettings.ActiveTab.Title.ToString

 

Once you get to ActiveTab you can use intellisense in Visual Studio to get all sorts of information regarding the page.