By Tobias (Keylinx) on Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:14:35 GMT

So the goal is to have this site running 4.8 of DotNetNuke within a week or two. The first attempt I did was to do the upgrade in one step 4.5 -> 4.8 (yes I am lazy ). That did not work for some reason. So I quickly restored my backup and went back to upgrading one version at a time. Actually it should work to do the one step upgrade, however doing it this way may teach me one or two thing about upgrading DNN on the way.

There is some problems that can be easily solved if you know what you are doing, this is how I should have done it, but for some reason did not.

1.  Do a backup of your DNN folder on the web site. You will definitly be needing that. God knows what files that may be misplaced on the way.
2. When you're at it, do a backup of your database as well. You never know what happens to it, when the evil sql-scripts of the DNN upgrade starts to shred your little tables filled with lovely data for your site.
3. Ok that was trivial, then start up winzip or some other extractor tool of your choice. Use the upgrade version from DotNetNuke download area and point it to extract in your DNN folder on the web server. Say 'yes to all' for every file it wants to replace.
4. Now go to the DNN folder, rename release.config to web.config
5. Open up the web.config and your old web.config in the backup folder (from step 1).
6. In my case there were three important things to copy from the old web.config
   i) The section. If not then you will not be able to run the upgrade, instead DNN will assume that you are doing a clean install and send you to the InstallWizard. 
   ii) The key "SiteSqlServer" from the section. If not then some modules won't work. For instance in my case, I noticed that Blog module and Users Online module stopped working.
   iii) Finally the section filed under the section in the config file is good to copy. If you don't do it. The user login function will not work, since password hashing is based upon the keys provided here.
7. Browse in to your DNN installation using your web browser (I was using http://localhost/dnn at that time, but using the normal url will hopefully work too). The DNN starts to execute the upgrade scripts. Once done, your portal is now using 4.6.2. Enjoy!

Well that was it for this time. Hope this short step-by-step list will help you out.

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Sun, 03 Feb 2008 02:03:25 GMT

I checked the database for this site today. As you can see there is not very much special things on this site. There is a couple of pages with information and a blog. When checking the size for it, I was stunned. The database file was over 600MB large!!!

So what will cause the database to grow that much? I started up my SQL Server Manager tool, and started to browse around the tables. The first thing I checked was the log tables and particulary EventLog table. There it was, over 74,000 rows with a lot of data in each row. It seems like the problem here is that the Event Log Viewer is logging everything by default, and it stores a lot of data. Clearing the log made the database shrunk to approx 10MB instead!

There is some valuable tips for this one:

1) On each installation, go to menu Admin->Event Viewer.

2)Go through all settings, see if you really need to log that much rows in your database.

3)Use the email feature, that will alert you when a serious error has occured. Although it seems that there is a bug in the DNN Core that spams the Event Log.

Hopefully this one is fixed in a newer version. As mentioned earlier, this is an installation that runs an old version.

 

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Sat, 02 Feb 2008 18:22:41 GMT

Yes, since there's been a busy autumn with releasing and maintaining our modules, there have been little time for maintaining the site. I believe however that one shall always run the latest version of DNN. For one reason, we must ensure that our modules works on the latest version. But also for security and stability on our site. Shortly we will try to move our location to a web host in United States. That is because our customer base is located there, and we want to ensure that they have quick response time to our site.

This forces me to have better understanding and control over the site. The database must not oversize, for one reason that it will be expensive to buy additional database space. The latest version must be used because we must keep up with the version that the hosting company uses.

Well I am no pro, doing this things and I will surely encounter some bumps on the road here. I thought I will keep you updated on the progress and give you some advice on what problem I have solved to get going.

Cheers!

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:55:37 GMT

The latest version of kXGallery has been out now for a couple of weeks, both on Snowcovered and DNN Market Place. Read more on our Modules->kXGallery page here. I happen to update the information page with the documentation aswell. This has been hanging for a while, but now its there.

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:22:38 GMT

Well, lets summarize the year 2007. Not did we just enter the DNN development market. We managed to establish a name and reputation among our customers, developing stable modules and have reliable and quick support. This has lead to many requests of making custom modules which we gladly are trying to help out with. A negative side of that is that there is not as frequent releases on our modules, since we are already working overtime. However we managed to release kXScroll v1.4 two weeks before christmas, which we hardly had any time to promote. Hopefully you have checked it out already.

2008 holds many new challenges. In Januar and Februar, our focus will be at kXGallery. We have so much new cool features added to it, and more to come. As you can see at the demo page we are dog fooding v1.2 at the moment. The new features are:

• Hovering effect on thumb nails (optional of course)
• Added description field.
• Enhanced the QuickTime support. Now it works as the WMV support in v1.1
• Added CSS examples to put focus on how customizable the design for the gallery are.

We will also move into a new location, since this is a kinda slow hosting at the moment. The server is located in Sweden, but our customer base is mainly located in U.S, so we will go on and see what hosting options we have "over there".

Well happy new year, and see you out there!

/Tobias

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Wed, 14 Nov 2007 23:21:35 GMT

Well, the new release of kXGallery was well received last week at Snowcovered.com. So well that it has entered the charts (No 4 at Hot New Modules and now at No40 at BestSellers). We are of course very proud of this, but we will not sit back and enjoy. No, we will try to have more frequency in adding new versions. There are a lot of plans going on for this module, since it has great capabilities that we are yet not using. Another thing is that there is hard competition out there with Gallery modules, you really have to pinpoint down what the user wants, and are willing to pay for. Please let us know what you are looking for. We have received som good feedback so far, and we know that the video options are something that people really want. And of course injecting existing modules.

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Mon, 12 Nov 2007 00:17:22 GMT

Just a quick note that we released kXScroll v1.3 this evening. Check it out at Snowcovered.com

/Keylinx.com

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Sun, 11 Nov 2007 15:00:08 GMT

I just added our new flash banner to the About section here. This banner will be used among our partners to attract more customers hopefully. My flash experience is a little bit low I must say, but the result came out nice after all.

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Wed, 07 Nov 2007 23:30:26 GMT

A lot of people has been emailing us asking about the roadmap of kXScroll. When will the next version be out and what does it contain? Well, we intend to release one version with approximately 5-7 weeks cycles. That means that the v1.3 is soon to be hitting the stores (well, the store as we only support Snowcovered). The following improvements will be done:

• Warning messagebox when changing content without saving in edit scroll will appear.
• Add HTML rich text boxes in settings, where HTML content shall be edited.
• Provide option to set left and right arrows on left side resp. right side of scroll.
• Provide option to set up and down links above and below the scroll. 
• Looping/wrapping content will be there.

/Keylinx

By Tobias (Keylinx) on Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:06:17 GMT

There has been a couple of weeks since my last post here. This week has been busy with releasing v1.1 of kXGallery, which contains more and better support for Windows Media Player.

We have also began to establish a partner agreement with a swedish company called 3wPortal who is a company selling complete CMS solutions including hosting. Our modules is going to be a part of their service package that they provide to their customers. If you are looking for a stable hosting solution located in Sweden, check it out.

/Keylinx.com