Finally, a New Look for DNN

Sometimes, it’s hard to say goodbye to the tried and true and sometimes you can’t spit out “See Ya!” quick enough. I don’t know about you, but I’m not shedding any tears to see good Ol’ Blue skin out of here. DNN’s got a fresh new look with the installed by default, MinimalExtropy skin. And while not installed by default, but available in the downloaded package, there is an interesting new skin called Extropy complete with its own SkinWidgets. The image below is from the Extropy skin.

Adding New Pages

In DNN 4.x and below, any new pages that you created were appended to the end of the menu. Now, when you're adding new pages you can define where you want the page to be inserted into the menu structure.

Defining Permissions

The user permissions grid now has a new tri-state feature that allows administrators to allow AND deny permissions based on user roles. This is a nice new feature because you can now easily override inherited permissions.

Host Settings

The host settings menu offers a few new items as well as you can see in the images below. Now, we have a .Net Framework setting that allows you to click a button and set the site to use the current framework available (top image) as well as jQuery setup options. Hooray for jQuery and for the DNN team for integrating it in to the DNN framework.

Fallback Doctype Setting : Sets the fallback Skin Doctype for webpages. This is used if the Skin does not define the DocType.

Enable Remember me on Login controls? : Sets the remember me checkbox on login controls. If remember me is allowed, users can create cookies that are persisted over multiple visits.

Admin Settings

Adding New Modules & Features

The DotNetNuke team really abstracted so much away from the core with this release that it was fitting to bring in some new terminology…You won’t find “Install New Modules” anymore, but you’ll notice that you will begin to see more of “Extensions”. Basically, it’s a one stop shop for modules, skins, skin objects, packages, etc. Works pretty much the same way as the module definitions feature did in the past, just beefed up and with a new name.

New DotNetNuke Extensions

You can still get to your module definitions from your host menu, but you now also have a new “Extensions” tab. You can see in the image below that the extensions manager allows you to manage just about everything all in one easy spot. Pretty cool, huh?

Admin Modules and Pages

Perhaps the most significant new feature is the complete abstraction of the admin pages and functions from the core, allowing admin modules and pages to be used just like other modules and pages. In the past, this was somewhat frustrating for website managers and developers alike. For example, with admin pages, you couldn’t take advantage of the same skin layout as in the rest of the site. Also, if you wanted to offer the ability of a user to manage one admin feature, you had to make that user a member of the admin role group exposing all of the admin features. But now, you can farm out the management duties without having to give out the whole farm. Nice.