You missed a fun and informative time if you weren't part of our June meeting. Our speaker, Will Strohl, was in town at a conference, so we had a live, in-person event, but still held it online so others could attend virtually.
Of course, if you were one of those who attended in-person, you had to fight through Chicago traffic. Will planned to taxi his way to Bluebolt's offices for our meeting, but was told it would be faster to walk!! Kate & I came in from Naperville, and at 4:00 we got in line to get into the city. I say "in line" because it was bumper to bumper from the outskirts of Chicago all the way to Bluebolt's door.
We got underway with the meeting a little late due to the nasty commute, but finally we started talking DNN. Will recorded the gotomeeting event and we're awaiting the video from him, but until then we can at least give you the major highlights.
DNN News
The big news was the release that very day (June 11) of DNN version 7.3. DNN founder Shawn Walker was speaking at Sarasota's .NET meeting at the same time so couldn't be online with us but sent us his slides.
The main theme for DNN 7.3 is performance. As you can see from one of Shawn's slides, there's impressive reduction in page load time, which means happier developers and happier website visitors. Read Bruce Chapman's Blog post to get the details of his speed tests.
Register for the DNN 7.3 Webinar scheduled for July 8, given by Shawn and by Mary Cauwels, Product Marketing Director for DNN Corp.
If you're leaving the technical details to folks like DNN integrators, but you want to know why Community Websites are such an important thing these days, then you may want to Register for the webinar called How Online Support Communities Lead To Customer Experience Excellence, given by Dennis Shiao of DNN and Kate Leggett or Forrester, coming up June 17.
User Group News
We're pleased to announce two new members to the Chicago Area DNN User Group. We recruit them from outside and we grow them internally. It doesn't matter to us! :-) CADUG co-founder Jim Nagy and his wife Susan announce the release of J&S versions 1.1 and 1.2 on June 10. (OK, maybe the version control analogy is a little much.) Welcome to the Group and to the world, little Alexandra and Benjamin. Both babies and mom are doing fine.
Understandably, Jim was not in attendance at the meeting. We'll forgive him this once. He typically supplies the DNN news, but in his stead, we're happy to report the following membership statistics:
ChicagoDNN.org Users: 340
Facebook Group Members: 32
Twitter @ChicagoDNN Followed by: 273 Following: 578
Linked In Group Members: 59
DNNsoftware.com User Group members: 71
The ChicagoDNN.org user count may be high due to a rash of registration hacks happening recently. It accounts for more people registered on a DNN site, and although it doesn't amount to much of a problem, it's an annoyance. Will offered that the biggest problem is the hackers write spam into their profile bio to possibly build up link traffic, and that Cathal Connolly wrote a good blog post with several solutions.
DNN Con or Connect in Chicago
Chicago hosted a Day of DotNetNuke back in 2010 that was quite successful. It was one of the first ones held, and since we had the guy who held the first one in the room with us, Will Strohl, we thought it a great time to discuss our next event.
We planned a followup to our 2010 event but DNN Corp asked us to hold off because they were going to do a DNN World event, and we graciously did so. And we've been holding off due to other groups having events ever since. So the time is right for Chicago's turn.
We discussed having what amounts to a DNN Con similar to the one planned for November in West Palm Beach and hold it in May of 2015. But we know there is a DNN-connect in the works for the same time. We'll be reaching out to them to see if a simultaneous conference with some common sessions via some skype-ish connection would be of interest to the community. It would certainly be novel! Everybody at the meeting thought it was a very interesting idea and that we should investigate the possibilities, which we will.
Do you like the idea of a show in Chicago in the spring? Do you like the idea of a marathon DNN event being held simultaneously in Europe and the states on one day? Leave your thoughts in the comment area.
Tech Talk: Hotcakes
Will, dressed in his orange Hotcakes shirt and matching shoes (really!) gave a very detailed and interesting talk on Hotcakes, an e-commerce module for DNN Platform that can also take advantage of the additional capabilities you find in Evoq Content and Evoq Social.
Will showed off the interface, how easy it was for the merchant to manage the store, how easy the site can be up and running with pre-installed sample product, and how beautiful the site can be with companion skins by folks like T-Worx and some of their other design and implementation partners.
Will took us to a couple websites in preparation for launch this week. When we get approval and a URL, we'll drop the links in the comments area.
Watch for the video recording of the meeting to get the myriad details. We'll post it as soon as we get it.
Next Meeting
We'll meet again, virtually, on July 9 at 8:00pm. Please note the time change: we're meeting later since so many are busy with kids, etc in the early evening. We hope this makes the meeting accessible to more people.
The meetings are much more lively when more people are there live. We see that lots of people are interested, by the number of views we get. Come to the meeting and contribute to the conversation, and then the others can hear what YOU have to say! See you next month.