By Travis Whidden on 6/26/2007 10:04 PM

Today I added a 404 redirect module to Snowcovered.  This module is very easy to use and extreamly important to anyone who is moving to DNN from their oldschool website. 

http://www.snowcovered.com/Snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=242&PackageID=7640&r=7955725ffc

Let me know if you have any questions or need assistance with it.

 

By Travis Whidden on 6/26/2007 9:35 PM

I could not find on DNNs website or on Google a way to configure custom 404 pages inside of DotNetNuke.   This was a little frustrating because I just ported over my website with nearly 6000 links (according to Google) and I did not want my viewers to be sent to a page with nothing on it. 

So, after thinking about it a little bit, I realized I could do this within IIS specifically for any DNN website.

Create a new web in IIS and point it to your DNN install. This new web will need to be configured with all the proper host headers (and removed from the old DNN website host header list).  Once you have it up and running, create your new DNN 404 page.  Make it hidden so it does not show up on your menu bar, but is accessible to your visitors.

Get the URL for this page, edit the properties for your new website, and click on the tab "Custom Errors".   Find the error code 404, and set the absolute path to it (without the http and the domain name). 

Test it and it works great! Example:  http://www.badassride.com/thisdoesnotexist

IIS Properties:

Cons: This creates another memory instance of the worker process so it uses more memory on your server. I would recommend only doing this for your portals that request it.

By Travis Whidden on 6/26/2007 8:34 PM

I am working on a hand full of projects where I dont want to send people that come in off search engines to 404 pages.  So I wrote a module this weekend that will take the 404 info (as seen in my other blog about how to create 404 pages), and redirect them to the correct page, without them even being bothered by a notice telling them the file is not found.

It was a very simple module (as I expected), and so far it looks and works good.  Now I just have to do the hard part... create all the redirects.   I am thinking I will extend the module to record links that were not handled, so mappings could be easly created for them.

Update: This module is available for purchase on SnowCovered ( http://www.snowcovered.com/Snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=242&PackageID=7640 )

By Travis Whidden on 6/26/2007 8:19 AM

I recently released a new version of my Lightbox Scrapbook onto SnowCovered.  This weekend I was running a trace on the SQL server looking for issues, and found that the Yahoo Slurp spider did not like the way I was running my scrapbook.  Infact, yahoo was pulling all of the non url friendly urls from DNN for some reason.  This bothers me because I dont want my non-friendly pages that I create in DNN to be listed as Default.aspx?tabid=xxx&etc.  

Anyhow, I just released a new version last night that uses the DNN API to create the friendly URLs.  It did break the existing URL structure, but this one should be final.

You can view this scrapbook in action on this website by clicking on "Scrapbook" on the navigation bar.  You will see the LightBox for DotNetNuke in action!

Enjoy!

By Travis Whidden on 6/10/2007 11:22 PM

As I was working on my 404 smart redirector, I found that its possible that users will get redirected to the default portal if they come in off a search engine.  This is bad because say your domain is like mine:  badassride.com  and a user comes to badassride.com/scrapbook/images/default.aspx from a search engine, well, they will get redirected to hjtcentral.com which is my default (0) portal.  Thats not good.  the traffic should stay within the correct domain alias.  I reported it on DNNs website, but I dont know if this will ever get fixed.

We have found several bugs with copying modules from page to page, where it has some strange effects. The other day, I actually had to go into the database and remove modules from the page with SQL because you just could not delete them.  Thats a whole other post to start, I just dont have time to type that up.

By Travis Whidden on 5/14/2007 5:43 AM