One of the exciting features for property agent this year is the new ratings and comments functionality.

Here is a sneak peak at a registered user posting and an anonymous user posting. Keep in mind, these screens are fully templateable and the rating selector is ajax based (so no postback!).

NukeNotes is a great example of Property Agent in action.

The site features:-

1. Featured and Property Types on the main page.
   1. The featured area has been cusotmised.
   2. Property Types renamed to Website Categories.
2. A search stand alone module on the homepage
3. Listing with "SnapShot" html.
4. Modified detail page.

It's great to see custom templates like this, what do you think?

One of the tools that I am using to refactor some of the module code when moving from VS 2003 to VS 2005 (DNN 3.x/4.x to 4.5.5+) is a tool called Simian.

It is primarily a refactoring tool that does similarity analysis on your code looking for duplication. It produces a log of any pieces of code it think that are duplicated accross multiple files. This is very important when multiple developers work on the same projects or on projects that evolve over a long period of time (it can be difficult to know what is available in the API). "Think of Simian as an independent pair of eyes that will assist in raising the quality of your software".

I've attached the log from Simple Gallery before the upgrade, this is an easy way to highlight where to focus your immediate energies on, because a reduced codebase is much easier to support.

The software supports Java, C#, C, C++, COBOL, Ruby, JSP, ASP, HTML, XML, Visual Basic source code and even plain text files. It also looks like they are Australian!

On wednesday night, my wife gave birth to our first child, Benjamin! He was 8 pound 5 ounces, 51cm's long and perfect.

Everyone is doing great! Looks like another .NET programmer has entered the world :)

One of our subscribers, maiersoft, has written an excellant article describing how to rotate news articles using the latest articles module. Nice Job!

The original question posted in the forums was how to display free form layout. You can display free form layout in the latst articles module by choosing the simple mode. This allows you to define the exact html that gets rendered.

The other mode is advanced. This mode uses a datalist allowing you to display a specific # of articles per row. The downside is that it does emit some html to do so.

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International Character Tàest

There have been some great RSS enhancements in the latest version of Simple Gallery (02.02.00+). You can view all of the enhancements live on the demonstration page.

Activate the IE7 RSS toolbar

The first enhancement is the highlighting of the IE7 toolbar with the list of feeds on a simple gallery page.

Enhanced Description

The next enhancement provides much more detail in the RSS description. This includes the description, a thumbnail image and a list of hyperlinked tags.

Enclosure Support

Attachments are now included as enclosures. This allows advanced RSS clients to optionally download the full images to a client.

List Extensions

List extensions allow advanced RSS clients to add advanced filter/sorting functionality to any RSS feed. The RSS feed describes what elements are sortable or filtered. In the case of Simple Gallery, we allow you to filter by tags or album.

If you are using IE7, you can view a live example here. Below is a screenshot of the sidebar from IE7.

We hope you like the changes!

A common question about Ventrian modules is how to customize various labels within modules.

For example, let's say we wanted to customize "Make a Suggestion" in the feedback centre.

1.) First, login as a super user (host) account.

2.) Navigate to Host -> Languages

3.) Select "Language Editor" from the action menu.

4.) Select Local Resources -> Desktop Modules -> Feedback Center -> LandingPage.ascx in the treeview.

5.) Change the MakeSuggestion.Text entry

6.) Click Update!

This configuration is possible due to the localization framework available within DotNetNuke.

Earlier in the week I posted a blog entry about upcoming features for simple gallery.

Well, here is a forum post with some nice pictures and an explanation on the new uploader.

Over the past few days, I've spent a great deal of time refactoring the code within Simple Gallery. It is now much simpler to maintain and enhance.

Some of the enhancements include:-

• A new "tagging" engine
• Reworked "Add New Photo" screen using SWFUpload for a great progress bar (No longer have a need for multiple file upload!).
• Create a default album when adding Simple Gallery to a page.
• Reworked top menu bar
• And many more minor enhancements.

I hope to also include Ray's editor to allow bulk editing of photos.

Have you heard about Open Force '07? A conference totally devoted to DotNetNuke!

I'm still debating on whether or not to make the trip, is anyone from this site making the trip?