A quick blog post as we near the final day of Movember 2011.

Thank to all of you who have taken the time to grow your fine Mo's (mustaches) for the past 30 days. Also thank you to those of you who started your mo's but caved to the weight that carrying a Mo brings, your efforts are still appreciated!

Do you work for one of our many DotNetNuke Partners? Are you already thinking about participating in Movember? Have I got a challenge for you.

Form a team for your company, you can do so via Movember.com, and then join the DotNetNuke Network! The partner that raises the most money for Movember

Dear DotNetNuke Community,

Movember is coming up, and I am getting the DotNetNuke Team going again this year. For those of you who weren’t with the company last year Movember is this. You start with a clean shaven face on November 1^st, and grow a mustache (not a beard, not a goatee) for the ENTIRE month, to raise awareness (and money) for cancers that effect men, primarily prostate cancer.

With all of the changes to DotNetNuke 6, a lot can be lost in the fact that you actually maintain the content of your website, and while the maintenance UI has changed, the content that you present is still up to you. A CMS can only do so much for displaying you content, if you want to do some fancy things, branch out of your standard HTML.

I recently wanted to do a couple of things for my car website (yes, I’m a car guy, so it is easy to use the website for examples).

1. I wanted to have a random image loaded in the top portion of the pages of the website, changing, or randomly loading, on each page load (not rotating live on the page).
2. I wanted to display a list of recent photos on the home page, and when you click on one of them I wanted them to open up in a light box.

I could have done this in any number of ways, but I chose to implement some simple jQuery for each, below I will show you how.

First things first, the website uses my free DotNetNuke skin, MultiFunction, available via Codeplex. I have some example documentation on how to customize the CSS for the skin to make your site unique, feel free to check out the Documentation page.

Have you ever had the need to blog a range of IP Addresses from accessing your website? Or perhaps, setup a website that is only accessible to a specific range of IP Addresses? DotNetNuke Request Filters are a great tool for getting such functionality configured, all configurable within your browser, without needing access to the settings in IIS.

If you follow any of my blogs, you may remember all the discussion last fall about Movember. Yes, you read that correctly, Movember, take the N in November and replace it with an M, Movember!

Why would you ever rename November to Movember? To raise awareness for cancers that affect men, primarily prostate cancer, but others as well. The basic premise of Movember is this, for the entire month, you grow a mustache. How simple is that? Start on November 1st, clean shaven, and finish on November 30th, clean shaven except for your mustache! All while raising awareness, and money for research into cancers that affect men.

The Personal Connection

Earlier this year my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. While he is fortunate that they believe it to be caught very early there is always the risk that it can spread, He is getting ready to start the process of treatment. So obviously, my connection to Movember this year is even stronger than last year.

Movember 2010

Last year we formed a DotNetNuke team on Movember.com, which we plan to do again this year, just as soon as they open up the process. I’ll post a blog, and update this blog post as well, with a link to the team and how you can join.

We had 38 folks join the team, and a lot more donate to the cause. While not everyone who joined the team worked for DotNetNuke Corporation, a number of the members were from our offices around the world. Check out this slide show comparing some of the employees to famous Mo’s (mustaches)

Then of course there is the fact that last year I said if I personally raised $1,000, I would shave my head at the end of the month. Well, I did, and I did.

To be honest, my wife was NOT happy about the head shaving thing, and most of the office was pretty put off by it as well! I won't be making that challenge again, not this year, but perhaps I will come up with something.

Goal for 2011

In 2010 we raised almost $7k for Movember, for 2011 we’re setting a goal of $10k, doable, but it is definitely going to take some work to get there! We’re going to need to grow our team, and we’re going to need to get everyone involved to try and raise money. I think everyone should set a goal

Getting Ready

So you have just under two months to start getting ready for Movember. Most importantly, prep your significant other for the fact that you are going to grow the mustache! If you can't grow a MO, then perhaps you can find a surrogate to do it for you!

In case you didn’t hear, DotNetNuke 6 was released yesterday. In preparation for the release I went up to our Engineering office in Langley Canada (I work out of our San Mateo, California office) to sit down with some of our developers and have them do some demonstrations of some of the new features in DotNetNuke 6.

These are all relatively short videos, with the goal of them being under 10 minutes, one or two is slightly longer than that. They are all free to watch! Here’s a listing of those videos, and URLs to them in the DotNetNuke Video Library. In no particular order.

So this year will be my 3rd year, (would be my 4th if I hadn’t bailed at the last minute on year 1), that I will be speaking at the St. Louis Day(s) of .Net. If you haven’t been to the STLDODN you should definitely check it out. It is a great two day event, and at $125 (if you register by 7/8/2011) the price can hardly be beat!

The event is being held this year on August 5th and 6th, 2011. Again at the Ameristar Casino in St. Charles, MO, about 10 minutes from where I used to live (two moves ago now).

Read the full blog post for all the details.

If you haven’t checked out the DotNetNuke Video Library lately, you really should, there is a lot of great content in there. I just uploaded 5 new videos as part of a new series that I am recording.

Beginning DotNetNuke Module Development, creating a Task Manager module for DNN. This will be a series of videos that get created over the next couple of months revolving around the creation of an open source Task Manager module. The module will be part of the DotNetNuke Forge, and the source code will be hosted on Codeplex.com.

The first videos show you how to get up and running with a new project, creating the project in Visual Studio using a template, how to install the module, and how to create the module in the Forge and how to use Codeplex for source control. The next round of videos (coming in the next couple of weeks) will get you into the development aspects of DotNetNuke.

You can check out the first 5 videos now in the Video Library, or using these direct links.

1. Task Manager Series Introduction
2. Creating the Task Manager Project
3. Task Manager solution overview and installation
4. Creating a project in the DotNetNuke Forge
5. Adding your source code to TFS on Codeplex
6. More coming soon!

For a continually updated list of the videos in the series, check out the Module Development Wiki page which has the videos listed, and will be updated as new videos are added.