Thursday, July 20, 2006

dasBlog and DotNetNuke happy at last!

I've been using dasBlog to host my blog for over two years and been planning on using DotNetNuke to manage the content of my main site (yes I know I have no content there yet).  I initially tried to use the blog module for DNN but I like the advanced features of dasBlog too much.  I _really_ like the mail to weblog feature!


So, some months ago I attempted to get dasBlog running as a child app under DNN.  I managed to get it mostly working.  I had to copy over most of the DNN assemblies into the dasBlog bin folder and make some small tweaks to the dasBlog web.config.  Even then, the admin bar would not work.  I used this scenario for several months.  However, today I decided to upgrade to DNN 4.3.3 and sat down to finally get dasBlog playing nice with DNN.


The first thing that fails when you attempt to load the blog website (dasBlog as a child web under DNN which is the root web) is a failure to find the namespaces listed in the DNN config file.  My first attempt at solving this was to use the remove element for the pages/namespaces collection and remove all the DNN namespaces for the dasBlog web.  This failed.  So, to fix the error, I copied the DotNetNuke.dll assembly to the dasBlog bin folder. 


The next error was a failure to find the UrlRewriter class.  Previously I had just copied over all the DNN binaries to the dasBlog bin folder to silence these errors.  This time, however, I added remove elements to the httpModules collection. One remove element fo reach DNN module listed.  And that worked! 


That's all I had to do.  So now, dasBlog works dandy as a child web under DNN 4.3.3.  The admin bar is working as well (I'm writing this from the admin section).