About DotNetNuke

DNN (aka DotNetNuke) is an advanced content management system (CMS) specifically designed for websites, Intranet deployments, and web application development. Administrators are given complete control of their content, layout, security and membership and are provided with a powerful set of tools to maintain a dynamic and interactive site.

Through the combined efforts of the DNN community, we have created a software framework that is reliable, flexible, and most of all, a powerful solution for meeting the needs of many different types of organizations. Learn More...

DNN Consultants with years of Experience

Back in 2004, when Efficion was just starting up and open source Content Management Systems were a fairly new concept, Efficion performed an exhaustive evaluation of the most popular CMS's in order to choose the best to build our business around. We chose DotNetNuke.

Built on top of the wonderful ASP.NET framework, it was technically superior, had a great community, a growing ecosystem, excellent leadership, had a great, extensible architecture, and was a very solid product. To this day, I feel strongly we made the right choice.

Since then, we've built the majority of our websites, intranets, and web applications on top of DNN. We offer a full range of services. Visit our services page to learn more.

Efficion's Modules for DNN

Articles Module

This Module is a more advanced version of DNN's Annoucements module. Features include: categories, searching, paging, comments, filtering, archives, thumbnailed images, details, and much more.

Categories Module

The Categories module serves as a base for other modules and allows for the sorting and filtering of records by Category.

DotNetNuke Related Articles

Programmatically determining the site's Fully Qualified URL and Path in DotNetNuke

There are hundreds of different functions and variables available through DotNetNuke, ASP.NET, and HTTP which can give you a variety of variations on your sites URL. I often find myself needing one variation or another as I'm building one application or another. The problem is, I have yet to find a clean and consistent way to get at the site's root or fully qualified URL regardless of whether the site is in a virtual directory (i.e. http://www.efficionconsulting.com or, for sites with virtual directories http://www.efficionconsulting.com/dotnetnuke). For DotNetNuke, I'm now using the following...

Protect Email Addresses from Spambots

One thing I think it's important to do is to protect my clients from spam. Clients like to be able to put their email address on their sites. But, putting an unprotected email address on a site can soon result in a lot of spam as spambots search sites looking for email addresses to add to their lists, often referred to as "harvesting". There are multiple ways to prevent this...

Efficion's Clean Skin

So many skins, so much bloat...

There are many thousands of skins out there in the DNN universe. Many companies specialize in producing skins for DNN and other CMS systems. I haven't spent a lot of time looking, but most of what I've seen, just isn't what I'm looking for.

As a developer with very strong HTML and CSS skins, and solid but limited image manipulation skills, what I really need is a good starting point so that I can quickly build out a custom skin that speaks to the personality of my client organizations.

Over the years, I've spent quite a bit of time producing and refining a skin that has exactly what I need to get started, and nothing extra. I have focused on creating truly clean, proper, HTML that works on all (within reason) browsers. And the few nice clean images it does use make it easy to manipulate the skin into any color in the known universe.

You can see an image of this skin now. Soon, I'll be sharing the source of it with everyone. Many people simply won't get it, "Not enough pop", "where's the stock photos", "too generic", and that's fine, but I'd love to see the skin that ships with DNN be a lot more like this.

Standardizing on Telerik's RAD Menu

One of the biggest drains on our time has been the menu system. As a result, for the last year and on into the future, we now only build our skins using Telerik's Rad Menu. To be continued...

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Quick review of DotNetNuke ECommerce stores

We've been doing a lot of DotNetNuke based E-Commerce projects lately. The projects we've done have really spanned a variety of store types (wine, audio files, church stuff, an automated shutoff system, resistors, printing products, and more), client types (wineries, churches, incentive programs, manufactures, master distributors) and feature requirements. So far, for all the DotNetNuke based E-Commerce sites we've built, we've used Catalook.

Catalook has a huge number of features, an immense number of configuration options, and is probably the worst implemented piece of software I've ever used. But it works. At times, though, I think it would be faster if I had just built the E-Commerce pieces of each of the sites from scratch.