Can I just say one thing... DNN brings out personality traits that I never knew existed. I swear sometimes I just want to PUNCH my LCD screen and find it hard to remain really polite, positive, calm, proactive, interested, and inspired, empowered... bla bla bla.... (remember these words - you'll see them all again very soon!).
Gawwwwd.. I just can't believe how something so little can drive me so dang mad.. It starts of with first.. bravely upgrading to 3.08 - oh after 4 days - 4 days mind you of frustration, finding out that 3.08 has got a lot of bugs in it (although since attempting, 140 bugs have been fixed and it's much more stable as I write today), but I'm weatherbeaten and demoralised at times and think... Developers have my respect, but BUG TESTERS - I'm in awe of you, how on earth you remain patient, civilised and not want to slap the life out of any living person in a 3 metre radius, I don't know.. Because that's how I feel.. It's not just the little two steps forward, and one step back as week meekly progress forward, in humble little steps.. it's the agonising 4 days trying, 4 day work lost, 4 day of frustration blocks that you get each time you bravely think - I'm going to get it done now and it's going to work and I'll start from scratch so I know where I'm going - thing that occurs each time.
And you say - how on earth can this be such a problem, it's not that it's a problem as such as time consuming... and then I have now come to the absolute conclusion (and would love to be wrong here) - if you have a 2.04/2.04/2.1.2 build, it's really not possible sucessfully create a brand new clean install, and import the data in, and not bring in the samll bugs in with it. Does any of that make sense? And why would I do it anyway - Well, I've got lots of links, hidden tabs, pages that are just linked to information I have setup around the place for handy reference... and I lose them all if I don't import the HTML table and Tabs table in at the very least. And for me, it was important to keep the integrity of the the links intact. Well, it was, but frustration, time, and the sheer annoyance with it has got the better of me.. so I'm manually recreating my site - and not importing anything...
And Why bother with this anyway - Well it's the principle of the fact that I WANT my skins tab to show under the Admin tab when logged in. And it doesn't. If I do a clean install, it does, but as I import data in, it goes away. Every single time. Each time I want to look at a skin or parse one, I have to look locally at it, I don't have the skin viewer because I did an upgrade from 2.04 to 2.1.2 and there were some glitches, and because I've revamped the whole look of the site, and it's functionlity ... I thought I'd do a clean install from scratch and just import the data, and each time, I lose the Admin/Skins tab and I'v now given up... I have to move on because it's annoying me.
*sigh*.. DNN drives me mad sometimes.. so I thought - wow, I need to get things streamlined here, and how do I do that, well, lets get the CuteSoft editor working so I can setup the templates and have some beautifully replicated pages working fairly quickly. Gawwwwd..... for some inexplicable reason, on my server only at this stage, I had to uncheck a button in IIS, in the default.aspx/advanced tab, that would allow caching of images with the editor menu. Originally I thought - OK I can work with this just by copying and pasting from local to live, but every time I would then have to count the icon buttons accross the top (there are 57 overall) to remember which was was the image one, to add an image. By the time this got sorted out, I had the idea of templates working which I could have worked around, but again, this took a while. I was told I'm the only lucky person with this problem, but I do remember being the only person who had issues with friendly urls - no one else did, and it appears I was just lucky to be the first - not the only - but I'd rather not be lucky in that instance at all.
And then.. I had a problem on my server with UNTESTED code uploaded by a developer which caused havoc, I mean havoc, it created a mini denial of service effect and subsequently the server threw a hissy fit... and at that time, I then got the sys admin guy to go over and check the server performance, because we hadn't twigged at this stage that it was the code because what made it worse was that an advertising campaign had been taken out so there were extra hits on the server to that site, making the problem occur more frequently. So the admin guy advises me on a couple of things that need to be done, and the coder had modified the code on the weekend, after the updates had been done, and then a windows authentication window would pop up during registration - and I'm not going into all the details, but it was just a nightmare to fix up, with the normal accusations flying between admin / developer. What also exasperated the situation is that the log files now, lock the server up trying to output the page, and of course.. everyone tries to view the log files to find out what's wrong... (me included till I worked out not a good idea) and I can tell you, if you're not 100% convinced... I can be somewhat fiery and direct... my many years of living have toned me down somewhat, and if I'm wrong, well, I'm wrong and I will admit that - I'm not too big a person, but many others are - and just love to make out that I'm wrong, wrong, wrong.. and accuse me of having lousy administrators, who don't know there job.. .. Is any of this familiar with anyone?So this has put me so far behind in work, in as much as I'm only taking on very select projects now until I get my site finished.. I now have an administrator who I can ring to sort things out.
But I like to finish on a good note in everything I do - Finally got the processing working with Catalook and tested it on another site. Got the site finished I had to for Friday, with minor updates happening today - they will be featured on my site when finished.
The new site, now that I've redone it over and over again is *toight* as GoldMember would say in the Austin Powers movie. And I've been forced to learn some better methods for site management myself, and improving all the time, and so I lose a few links - they don't show a 404 error page, but take you back to front page. I'll just display on front page as links if need be.
I've just been so tired trying to sort things out like this and in the meantime, get some projects finished, without annoying people, but again, this is the nature of DNN and I can only summarise by saying - if you have a site that you want to work now - use DNN 2.1.2 for reliability and stability, and, test modules before going live, and DNN3 has had about 140 + bug fixes in January - with only a handful left before released, then it will time to focus on getting the modules ported accross. And this has been the biggest and most daunting upgrade for DotNetNuke that I know of and I feel for those guys trying to sort out problems that have just come pouring in, but in the whole scheme of things, it will all work out because it always does.
Because I'm updating the site, I'm hoping that I can import the blogs successfully to the new build. I've got some new cool little helpers/modules that I have tweaked a bit to compensate for the fact not all modules do what they should.
When my site is finished, I'll launch my official skinning site that will be where I can start moving things forward. It's DotNetNuke all the way for me.. which is why I suffer through all this dang misery and frustration because I've never seen another product, group of people or cool stuff that can be done, which is I just perservere, and in the end it will be great. And from there, I hope to further inspire those who hung on in the rocky journey of pioneering technology.
PS>>> Got my booooootfiul little kittens yesterday - Two Tonkinese kittens - they are gems.. Tiger (male) and Lily (female) - they are Lilac Tonkinese kittens.. and Lily - shakes and meows... very scared still but Tiger - the friendliest kitten we've ever seen - he's settled in quite well thanks very much.
Off to do some paying work now - and quotes, I've been getting the templates packaged for sale and they are looking mighty fine..
Nina Meiers