This month we have a special speaker for our monthly St. Louis DotNetNuke User Group meeting.

This months speaker is Brandon Haynes, who I had the pleasure of meeting at last year's DotNetNuke Connections event in Las Vegas. He is an excellent speaker and an active, knowledgeable member of the community, so I hope you will be able to attend.

Of note this month, we're planning to make available a higher quality broadcast of the meeting. We'll be streaming from Brandon's computer (showing his slides,demos etc directly) with a "picture in picture" of Brandon speaking in the corner of the video.

This will be the first attempt at this arrangement for an actual meeting, but we've done some testing and are excited about the results so far. I believe this will bring our online viewers much nearer to a first class experience.

Help show your support for DotNetNuke in St. Louis and around the world by participating online! You'll be able to find our stream on our Bambuser channel and if you check the website the day of the meeting you can find our GoTo Webinar information.

About Brandon:

Brandon Haynes is a member of the DotNetNuke core team, and serves primarily by providing security-related and organizational guidance. He is the chief executive officer at Everysport.net Inc., which delivers enterprise resource planning, web-presence, e-commerce, and integration-related functionality to recreational organizations. With more than twenty years of experience in software development, Brandon’s professional interests are currently focused on the nexus between intellectual property law, technology, and business. He is currently pursuing a graduate degree at Harvard University.

The goal of our next meeting is to address widgets as extensions to the DotNetNuke framework. It seems the community at large, including myself, know little of widgets or their intended purpose. In our upcoming meeting on December 21st, we intend to address this topic collaboratively. This is a new approach to our meetings where several of our members will each be bringing a little slice of knowledge so that we can gather different perspectives on the topic. I think DotNetNuke widgets is a great topic to start with – as they are very concise by nature and therefore easy to demo/discuss.

Topics for the Meeting

Keeping in mind the fact that we’re going to be collaborating together on this month’s topic – I’ve added a module to our home page that will allow everyone to submit a topic that they would like to talk about. I envision us each spending 10-15 minutes with each topic (of course this may vary based on number of topics submitted and the exact content of each, but…).

I’ll use the first portion of the meeting to provide a level playing field talking about the What? Why? How? of Widgets in DotNetNuke. I’ll cover:

• What is a widget?
• Why do we care?
• How does it work?

Next, I’ll turn it over to our group to talk about individual (more specific) topics. So, use the module to tell everyone what you’d like to talk about, knowing that I’ll already have covered the fundamentals. I’ll also organize the submitted topics as best I can into some sort of logical order.

Here are some general thoughts in the form of questions to help you think about what you might want to research and share:

• How could creating a particular widget help minimize style/markup variations between a skin, module and the core framework?
• What does a widget provide that a skin object does not? For what use is a widget better suited?
• What widgets come with the DotNetNuke core? What widgets are actively used by a default installation of DotNetNuke?

Join the Fun

I think there is a large tendency to look at a user group located in a different city and only have an “outside looking in” perspective. In fact, that pretty much sums up my position in regards to DNN groups in other parts of the country & world. But – if you think about it – remote participation is not only possible, but downright easy. We’ve been streaming live and hosting an online meeting for the past several months and it has worked out really well – more frequently people are jumping in and are not just spectators but are actually participating remotely and we’ve found this to be of great value.

With that in mind – consider this your official invitation to join us for our next meeting and share what you know about Widgets. If you prefer to watch – no worries, that’s fine to – I just want to make sure you know we welcome your participation in our group.

If you would like us to carve out a few minutes for you to give a Widget demo or explain a particular concept/approach with Widgets – please feel free to submit a topic on our home page.

Existing Resources (Hi Will!)

Here are some existing DotNetNuke Widget related resources on the web. Please feel free to add any other public resources in the comments to this blog post.

• Relocation Widget
• DNN 5 Widgets: Style Scrubber Widget
• DotNetNuke 5 Widgets: Embed Widget - YouTube
• Creating a DotNetNuke Skin Widget Manifest File