Open Source Articles

If you've been watching the journey of Hotcakes Commerce over the years at all, you know that it has a very interesting past.  It began as a different platform altogether. It became a wildly successful commercial e-commerce solution that consistently was in the top 3 products in the DNN Store.  It then became an open-source e-commerce platform, making it freely available to the world.  This is the solution you're reading about and know about today.  

Over the years, I’ve followed, learned, and tried many different ways to build extensions in DNN.  Of course, the primary extension I’ve built has always been a module.  If you’re new to DNN, a module is simply an app that you can install for visitors to interact with on your website.  After working on DNN solutions since 2003, I’ve settled on a very specific development pattern that we implemented here at Upendo Ventures.  Using our development pattern was time-consuming to get started with a new project, but it had too many benefits to avoid.  We’ve found and publicly released this development pattern to all of you.  Now you can use our development pattern too, but without any of the effort that we used to put into it

If you've been around DNN for a while, you may vaguely remember a monthly show that existed where myself and Joe Brinkman spoke about the various interesting news items of the month, and we also interviewed various folks in the DNN community. Well, it's back! That's right. This is the first of many DNN Hangout shows for you to enjoy.

The Awareness DNN Ecosystem Advisory Group held its September meeting yesterday. We had new members and some exciting updates, including DNN Open Friday, interesting blog posts, and updates on the upcoming community dashboard. Our group continues to do a great job of creating and spreading DNN-based content around the world. We are about to turn a couple important corners. Exciting!

The Awareness DNN Ecosystem Advisory Group has a lofty but long overdue goal of updating the DNNSoftware.com website.  Some of the things we're trying to address include: making DNN Platform more obvious, increasing the usability of the website, and updating the messaging found throughout the website.  We have some rockstar members that are putting in some excellent work towards this goal.

The Awareness DNN Ecosystem Advisory Group held its August meeting yesterday.  We had new members and some exciting updates, including new DNN extensions, interesting blog posts, and a DNNSoftware.com website proposal.  Our group continues to do a great job of creating and spreading DNN-based content around the world.  This is especially exciting since many people have been having their vacations recently.

Last night, I had the pleasure of presenting to the Toronto Area DNN Users Group (a.k.a., TADUG), hosted by Aderson Oliveira.  TADUG is currently enjoying a revival, so I couldn’t pass up this opportunity.  He asked me to bring some e-commerce goodness to their user group, and I hope I delivered.  In this presentation and Q&A, we discuss some of the most critical trends and techniques that e-commerce website owners should remember.  Spoiler alert…  There are actually 6 tips in this presentation.  Surprise!

The summer makes us all feel busier than usual.  There’s always so much activity.  As a result, June’s meeting didn’t have the normal level of attendance, but we surprisingly had some great conversations, ideas, and energy around increasing traction.  We had excellent discussions about community-generated content, content locations, and theming our participation.

It’s taken me nearly a month to carve out the time to post this blog post, but the video went live the same day.  In the future, I’m going to put in the extra effort to draft and publish this announcement much sooner.  It seems that the warmer weather makes us all busier, and I’m apparently not immune to this.  Please enjoy our May 2018 meeting video!

I know what you’re thinking, “What do you mean, version 3.2 is out? I haven’t heard about version 3.1!”  No worries… Version 3.1 did come out and it was released, but none of the marketing materials went out to announce it.  I’m taking the initiative to announce both releases at this time.  They are exciting releases too – with 3.1 offering support for variants in promotions and 3.2 supporting UPS Freight.