404 errors on fresh DNN 7.x installations

..it happens. When you get 404 errors for all pages on fresh installation, just change <modules> in web.config to <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">. Thats it.

DotNetNuke 7.2.0: Prevent "Getting Started Page" for SuperUsers

In DNN 7.2.0 has been added "Getting Started Page" for Super Users. It looks like this:

So, "Getting Started Page" appears on the next conditions:

1. Current User is SuperUser.
2. Current TabID is equal to the param "GettingStartedTabId" (for current Portal) from the "PortalSettings" table.
3. Setting "EnableGettingStartedPage" from the "HostSettings" table should be equal "True".

You can hide this message in few ways:

1. Just tick a checkbox "Don't show this again" at the bottom left corner. But this will hide "Getting Started Page" for current SuperUser only, and will show it for other SuperUsers.
2. Change "EnableGettingStartedPage" setting from the "HostSettings" table to "false". After this change, "Getting Started Page" will not be displayed for all SuperUsers.
3. If you like to change it for all future installations you plan to do, then you can edit "Install/DotNetNuke.install.config.resources" file in your installation package. In this file you can find "<EnableGettingStartedPage>True</EnableGettingStartedPage>", what is very easy to change to "False".

BTW: I have not found a way on how to change "EnableGettingStartedPage" setting from the "HostSettings" at the FrontEnd.

DotNetNuke folder: encrypted files caused access denied error

Had to spend over the 3 hours with a client until found that files in the folder are encrypted. This caused "Access denied" error and did not allow DotNetNuke to work properly :( BTW: encrypted files in the Windows 2008 environment highlighted with green. To remove encryption just select all files, right click and remove encryption from the files.

DotNetNuke 7 styles checkboxes and radiobuttons

Found one interesting thing: DNN 7 styles all checkboxes at the form after page loads .

This happens at the dnn.jquery.js script (/* DNN customized checkbox/radiobox */). It makes changes for all checkboxes and radiobuttons: controls are hidden, but instead it shows styled span.

 It looks beauty and great, but sometimes i need simple HTML checkboxes, like this . Had to digg a lot, but have not found where is a problem. So had to check myself and found easy fix. All you need to show simple checkbox or radiobox, just add class="normalCheckBox" or "normalRadioButton" and your controls will be standard.

Enjoy :)

SearchItemWordPosition grows very fast because duplicates

One of my clients got this problem. His DB went from the 80 Mb to 1 Gb in just one week. After deep research i found table SearchItemWordPosition contains 33 millions records and takes a lot of space in the DB. On deeper search i found it contains a lot of duplicates and this problem is very common in the DNN Community. So first of all i have made a script to remove duplicates:

ClientDependencyLoader takes 100% of CPU

One of my clients had serious problem with DotNetNuke 6.1.4 Pro. His site had small number of visitors at start, but after some advertisement, number of visitors jumped to the 30,000 uniq visitors per day. Site was under the good dedicated server (2*Xeon and 16 Gb RAM), so client did not expect any problems with performance. But one day CPU has taken 100%. Site was very hard to open. It was real problem. We had to make deep digging with JetBrain tools and at the end of end we found problem. 90% of each thread calls ClientDependencyLoader from the ClientDependency.Core! It was a source of problem. To turn it off we had to change the web.config:

<compilation debug="false" strict="false">

to this one:

<compilation debug="true" strict="false">

I know, this is not good trick, but at least CPU back to the normal 25-35%.

To find pages with installed module you can run this SQL code (just replace HTML with Friendly Name of required module):