"It needs to be dynamic." That is what my boss is always saying to me when it comes the newest bit of usability that I want to add to my latest DotNetNuke site. He keeps telling me that whatever I do, it needs to be automatic for our client using the website. So, the latest bit of usability that I wanted to add was, having a list of quick links in the footer of each page. Basically, I wanted to take the clients services and make them a list in the footer and hey, DNN should allow me to do this easily, right?

I posted this question to Twitter and received no response, other than someone else was looking for and answer as well. So, I had to do some digging on my own. Ugh. I am using the Telerik RadMenu and went through the Skinning Whitepaper. I finally came across the ShowOnlyCurrent attribute which didn't sound like what I wanted. This is great for sub menus and I use this all the time. But, this great tool also allows you to use specific page's child items. Perfect! So, here is how you do it:

Something that constantly comes up for me while working on a DotNetNuke Site as a designer, is making the site look good, being friendly toward the Search Engines and yet still keeping all of the dynamic capabilities of DNN, which is why we use it, instead of straight HTML, right? I have come across a few little tricks in which I will share in my next few posts.

One of my favorites is also very simple. It replaces the default title of a container. Doing this will remove a decent amount of the code bloat around the title, leaving it open to place directly into a header element of your choice. This also leaves it open to more easly target your title with CSS, without having other classes and elements getting in the way.

One of the challenges that is often faced when optimizing a DotNetNuke 4.x site, is all of the extra code bloat making it harder for the search engines to find your content that is important. Using the new Relocation Widget that comes with DotNetNuke 5.0 + allows us to overcome some of these challenges. The Relocation Widget will allow you to place your important content at the beginning of your code while moving the less important content (to the search engines) at the end.

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