Did you miss our meeting? Shame on you! Well, no problem, really. Read our recap here and watch our recording.
Of course, we start with giving thanks to our sponsors. PowerDNN hosts this website. They also host many of Sprocket Websites' clients and they are extremely responsive and supportive. Also, we want to thank J&S Tech Designs for sponsoring our GoToMeeting sessions.
The DNN world is a bit quite since mid-July as Jim Nagy reported in his industry news segment. DNN Corp is doing some webinars as it promotes its newly named Evoq Content (formerly DotNetNuke Professional Edition) along with Evoq Cloud and Evoq Social. A webinar is scheduled for September 5 at 9am Pacific. Visit DNNsoftware.com for the details and to register.
DNNcon is coming in October. Visit www.DNNcon.com to learn, well, not much more since it's not yet populated with the speakers, although it should be any day now. Scott from our group is one of the speakers and has just received a schedule of sessions. Good news! There's a good mix of sessions devoted to the DNN Platform, the open source core of the product.
Our main presentation for the evening was given by Phil Wegrzyn, co-founder of the Chicago DNN User Group and frequent contributor to tech talks.
Phil shared his latest project: working with jcrop and with resizer.net to provide basic editing capabilities to DNN administrators directly on the website. There are numerous tools from Paint to Photoshop and websites like resize.it and picmonkey.com, but it's often preferable to keep the image adjustments "in-house". The most obvious reason might be that your pictures need to be a certain aspect ratio or even a specific size. Your built-in image adjuster can provide that.
Phil showed how he integrated some jquery code into his website and then via the Open Web System (OWS) module made an interface to upload a photo. Then, the uploaded picture was displayed on the webpage with a cropping control in a specific aspect ratio (width and height proportion fixed). The jquery was doing the magic of letting the user move the box around, resize it to get just the portion of the picture they wanted, and then click the button to crop.
Module developers: consider adding this capability to your modules which allow users to upload images. Watch the video for the details, then go get the jquery and/or the dll's to add it to your modules.
NEXT MONTH: a live, in-person meeting in downtown Chicago at the Quigly Center, Tuesday, October 1, at 6:30. More details to come.