I was a bit tired last night - so sorry- missed out on my normal ramblings and thoughts and today is the last day I can work on some areas before submitting them to the core team for review and comment.  I think Gemini has been a great implementation for bug testing and although not open to the public for bugs, the forums are well covered by core team members who post bugs into the bug tracker and Shawn Mehaffie has taken on the task of managing and following some of the bugs, checking there are no duplicates and making sure there is definition between what's a bug and what's an enhancement.

At this stage, not much in the way of enhancements are being considered now as they're closing off all development for this version.

I installed 3.11 on http://www.dnnbeta.com today and the installation screen is pretty cool - telling you what's going on.  I have nearly finished the email newsletter so will send it out in staggered groups, since to be honest, I get so many clickthroughs the server just can't hack it.. I mean - it's a good server and all, but that's asking alot, so will be sending out via country - and the US seems to have the most registrations, so I'll split it further.

I've been working on the skinning documentation - it's a whitepaper ok, not a tutorial - it's taken from the very well written 2.1.2 and been modernised with this version of skins, extra skin objects and some FAQ's and Troubleshooting to help people on their way.  I don't know if it will be accepted, I have to send to Shaun/Scott for review tomorrow and that's been taking up alot of my resources in thinking and planning.  And alot of checking back on files, structures and working out why things are done the way they are.

There has been talk on the forums for a while now with CSS files and their relevance, why do we need so many, why not just one and I have thought really hard about it, but don't think that one is the way to go.  I think that better education and an understanding of how the DotNetNuke css hierarchy works, which is what I have in my articles (and more coming).  What I would love to see is better information for the module devleopers to help them create modules that have better flexibility in managing the look and feel. In fact, I've taken many modules and split the css from the hard coded page layouts in the ascx file and applied classes to them.

I found that there were many modules that have css that collides with the core css and you notice this on the pages quite distinctly when done incorrectly and again, just an education process in my opinion because we're getting alot more new developers coming into the market.

Overall, the thought process that has gone into the design and methodology of DNN has been well discussed, and when a better solution, that can be shown to be better, the core team developers are mature enough to review and make decisions on whether to implement change.  I can see further discussions on how CSS works in DotNetNuke coming up in the next couple of months as the next steps into polishing the application come into play.

I got an email from Susanne at Catalook and she very nicely made some changes I asked for and could show why it was important - this came to the handling of images - previously - put into the portal folder, were mixed up with the other site images, and now I can have them in a sub folder - just brilliant and very grateful of the changes. Susanne also addressed the issue of *email a friend* and now there is a setting that allows you to either allow someone to modify or not - which means the email a friend can be edited or left as is.

Kirsty has been working on the features of Catalook and the options and there are quite a few, we're still working on getting our head around some of the bundles and how they work, but nothing that we can't do. You can edit the style sheet now and after the proper release of 3, will have more information about some of the cool features.  Even to the point of having the administration of files in a vertical format, instead of the previous horizontal format.

Fingers crossed, I'll have online my first exe - it's a test exe for the many help and tutorial files that are being compiled and this is another reason I've just held off with the email - as well as I'd like to have all the skins back online - I did make some modifications.. they aren't perfect in mozilla, but they're at the point now that I feel it's ok to have available for download.

As you can see on the survey - it's neck and neck with some of the results - I'll have another one next week and will keep them simple and short and topical where possible.

Well that's about it for now - could talk about lots of things - I thought of a new idea tonight - so going to try it in the morning - and was amazed at the fact that new ideas keep coming up when you think you've covered it all.

Thanks for being such an interesting audience and takint the time to read what's on my mind. I'll catch you again tomorrow -

Cheers
Nina Meiers