Themes are a good way to visually differentiate and/or brand SharePoint sites.  Here is how to install a new theme. 1. modify an existing theme 2. add preview image to 12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES 3. modify the SPTHEMES.XML file in 12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033 folder.  4. IISRESET   References: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa979310.aspx

What happens when your SmarterMail Enterprise server gets out of sync with Plesk?  Among other things, Plesk gets fussy.  I swear, just a few days ago I could add and remove mailboxes just fine. Today I spend some time figuring out how to make Plesk and SmarterMail play nice again. mchk.exe --domain --domain-name=mydomain.com It's a Plesk command line tool that makes Plesk see SmarterMail at a "special" level. Yes, it works. It doesn't sync up mail accounts, but I just needed to delete the domain anyway. This did the trick. The tool itself has a bite, be careful with it. http://download1.swsoft.com/Plesk/Plesk7.5/Windows/Docs/plesk-7.5-win-advanced-features-manual/9781.htm http://www.swsoft.com/ http://www.smartertools.com/...

SubText is the blog engine of my choice. Skinning is simple, it's free, it's written in .Net and it's feature rich. Now if I we could only get some visitor stats.  Google Analytics to the rescue. JavaScript tracking code is what makes GA work.  Adding the tracking code to SubText was simple enough. DTP.asxp is the page that SubText uses to dynamically render content. So we just insert the JavaScript snippet right above the </body> tag and we're all set. GA takes a few hours for the stats to show up... still waiting. References: http://idunno.org/archive/2007/04/21/Adding-Google-Analytics-to-Subtext.aspx...

I thought the name for this module is perfect. It's a gallery module that lots you page a single folder with arrows. I'll improve the basics at some point, but for now, it is what it is.   Download theOh So Simple Gallery all zipped up and ready to go. Warning: download and use at your risk. you should be comfortable with vb.net to fix anything or to make improvements.

http://www.oaksvillage.org/default.apsx is still under development. But the pure CSS skin with DNN backend is ready. Thanks to a very friendly graphic designer the site looks very nice. Next step is SEO and analytics software hookup! Frustrations include the fact that DNN does not produce validatable code. So, I ended up with quirksmode in transitional HTML. I ended up using the new DNN:Nav navigation control. CSS flow box drop-down was fixed by overflow:hidden and using an admin skin for editing content in controls that would otherwise break the page. A day's labor. I'm using my home-made javascript transition module that I used MooTools...

About a year ago I've started to focus on two technologies to develop websites with. Dot Net Nuke and SharePoint. Both products are .Net based and Microsoft backed. At the end of this post are links to articles that do a good job comparing the two frameworks. Needless to say, as frameworks, these products vary greatly in the way you can accomplish your goals. Nevertheless, having the common thread of .Net makes them similiar in so many ways. I'm excited to continue to explore (and amazed at) some of the powerful tools that each product provides out of the box.  As...