For those of you who want to use products like Snapsis Pageblaster and iFinity URL Master with your Active Social and Active Forums installations, this advice may prove of benefit in addition to the helpful guidance already provided by Active Modules.

I also include NeatUpload in this because it can cause issues if running on your site in integrated mode.
NeatUpload is presently used by UltraVideoGallery (UVG).

The idea here is to allow interoperability between what is essentially 4 different URL handlers (and an upload handler, if you use UVG), while still allowing your site to get the benefits of all, especially Pageblaster's caching and compression. I don't get paid to promote these - it's just that I use them on my site

With respect to versions, you should be running URL Master 2.2.3 or newer, Pageblaster 3.5.3 or newer, and the current versions of Active Social and Active Forums. I found that the version of Pageblaster in particular is very important to achieve reliable results, although you will have to hunt through the Snapsis forums to find the 3.5.1 release and 3.5.3 DLL.

The following assumes that you run your IIS 7 application pool in Integrated mode; Classic mode is not recommended, and IIS 6 is not supported by the Active Forums URL Rewriter.

web.config

1. Ensure that runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" is set in Modules

2. Use the following load order for modules:

ForumsRewriter
SocialRewriter
ScriptModule
RequestFilter
UrlRewrite (either the DNN or Pageblaster module)
Pageblaster
UploadHttpModule (this is NeatUpload, used by Ultra Video Gallery)
Exception
UsersOnline
DNNMembership
Personalization
Analytics
RadUploadModule

3. Enable the following handlers (for Pageblaster):

PBCSSHandler
PBJSHandler
PBGIFHandler
PBJPGHandler
PBPNGHandler

4. Find the IIS Compression config within web.config (or modify using the GUI). Change

urlCompression doStaticCompression="true" doDynamicCompression="true"

to

urlCompression doStaticCompression="false" doDynamicCompression="false"

5. In the NeatUpload section, further down in web.config, change the following:

useHttpModule="true"

to

useHttpModule="false"

This will disable the upload bar until Bizmodules make an update to only use Neatupload within its own pages, or use a different upload unit. However it is essential to run your sitein Integrated mode.

Snapsis.PageBlaster.Config

1. At minimum, include the following setting in excludePaths:

path pattern="(dnncore|jquery|common\.js|/desktopmodules/ultravideogallery|DotNetNukeAjaxShared\.js)" excludeFrom="All"

2. Comment the lines:

path pattern="\.js$" excludeFrom="MergeJS"
and
path pattern="\.css$" excludeFrom="MergeCSS"

3. Uncomment the line:

path pattern="(Web|Script)Resource" excludeFrom="All"


I hope this of assistance. Naturally Active Modules has nothing to do with this config and can't easily provide support. However you may find the following topics of particular assistance for AS and AF:

http://www.activemodules.com/activesocial/kb/vanity-url-options/

http://www.activemodules.com/activesocial/kb/troubleshooting-vanity-urls-under-iis-7/

http://www.activemodules.com/activeforums/kb/installing-vanity-urls-for-active-forums/

http://www.activemodules.com/activeforums/kb/getting-started-with-active-forums-vanity-urls/

Thank you. that was in a word: Awesome.

I had to give up on PB, but maybe I can revisit now. Have you had chance to test PB doing replaces on forum post text? I found that if the AJAx paging was used in AF, it would not process the replaces correctly when moving between a topics pages. In other words, Page 1 would replace just fine because it didn;t use AJAX. But page two text would get ignored because it was not processing through PB for some reason.

Also I don't see why module providers don't utilize the RADUpload that comes with DNN. It does progress bars, upload status/info and multiple uploads and works great for me.

I may have to revise a couple of PB things now due to the way PB works behind proxies. Ultimately if you can enable IIS compression, that's far better.

I'll have a look at the Ajax replaces when I get a sec.

Agree re:RADUpload. I've asked Bizmodules to use that instead if possible.

Not sure if it is mentioned in the ActiveModules links you provided, but you should also set the page on which the Active Forums are located so that it isn't allowed to redirect in the Url Master module.  This is because the Active Forums Url Rewriting will rewrite the Url (correctly) but the Url Master module will see it and think it's an unfriendly version.

The Url Master Knowledge Base always has the latest information on compatibility : see here:

http://www.ifinity.com.au/Products/...ive+Social

Thanks Bruce. I've had to exclude it for certain functionality, but not all.

I'm not able to edit the original post, but I wanted to correct this based on some further work.

If you can possibly help using IIS 7 compression rather than PageBlaster's, I recommend it. That's the basis of this revision. I have found a lot of issues with Pageblaster's own compression, even in the latest version, particularly with Javascript files. It may be a DNN 5.6 issue, but it does annoying things like dropping the closing tag in files, which may be a bug. I do, however, have some guidance in here if you need to use it for compression. Other features are unaffected by using IIS 7 compression.

For those of you who want to use products like Snapsis Pageblaster and iFinity URL Master with your Active Social and Active Forums installations, this advice may prove of benefit in addition to the helpful guidance already provided by Active Modules.
 
I also include NeatUpload in this because it can cause issues if running on your site in integrated mode. NeatUpload is presently used by UltraVideoGallery (UVG). The idea here is to allow interoperability between what is essentially 4 different URL handlers (and an upload handler, if you use UVG), while still allowing your site to get the benefits of all, especially Pageblaster's caching and compression. I don't get paid to promote these - it's just that I use them on my site.
 
With respect to versions, you should be running URL Master 2.2.3 or newer, Pageblaster 3.5.3 or newer, and the current versions of Active Social and Active Forums. I found that the version of Pageblaster in particular is very important to achieve reliable results, although you will have to hunt through the Snapsis forums to find the 3.5.1 release and 3.5.3 DLL.

The following assumes that you run your IIS 7 application pool in Integrated mode; Classic mode is not recommended, and IIS 6 is not supported by the Active Forums URL Rewriter.


Changes to web.config

1. Within the system.webServer section, modify the following:

modules

to

modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"

2. Use the following load order for modules:

ForumsRewriter
SocialRewriter
ScriptModule
RequestFilter
UrlRewrite (either the DNN or Pageblaster module)
Pageblaster
UploadHttpModule (this is NeatUpload, used by Ultra Video Gallery)
Exception
UsersOnline
DNNMembership
Personalization
Analytics
RadUploadModule

3. If using IIS Compression, disable (comment out) the following handlers (for Pageblaster):

PBCSSHandler
PBJSHandler
PBGIFHandler
PBJPGHandler
PBPNGHandler

Note: This should be done only if you are using IIS compression. Otherwise, for PageBlaster, enable them.

4. Find the IIS Compression config within the system.webServer section (or modify using the GUI).  Ensure it is set to:

 urlCompression doStaticCompression="true" doDynamicCompression="true" 

Note: This should be set to false for both if you will use Snapsis compression.

5. Within system.webServer, insert the following (with enclosing < and > tag for each line)

      customHeaders
        remove name="Vary"
        /remove
        add name="Vary" value="Accept-Encoding"
        /add
      /customHeaders


6. In the NeatUpload section, further down in web.config, change the following:

useHttpModule="true"

to

useHttpModule="false"

This will disable the upload bar until Bizmodules make an update to only use Neatupload within its own pages, or use a different upload unit. However it is essential to run your site in Integrated mode.


Snapsis.PageBlaster.Config

1. At minimum, include the following setting in excludePaths:

path pathern=".*" excludeFrom="Compression"
path pattern="(dnncore|jquery\.min\.js)" excludeFrom="All"

Note: Set the .* line only if using IIS compression. If using PageBlaster compression, add the following exclusion:

path pattern="\.js$" excludeFrom="All"

2. Comment the lines:

path pattern="\.js$" excludeFrom="MergeJS"

and

path pattern="\.css$" excludeFrom="MergeCSS"

3. Uncomment the line:

path pattern="(Web|Script)Resource" excludeFrom="All"



C:\Windows\System32\inetserv\applicationHost.config

Find the line that starts with:

httpCompression directory

Within dynamicTypes, set

add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false"
to
add mimeType="*/*" enabled="true"

Within staticTypes, set

add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false"
to
add mimeType="*/*" enabled="true"

Note: this should only be done if using IIS Compression, to achieve best page compression results.




I hope this is of assistance. Naturally Active Modules has nothing to do with this config and can't easily provide support. However you may find the following topics of particular assistance for AS and AF:

http://www.activemodules.com/active...l-options/ http://www.activemodules.com/active...der-iis-7/ http://www.activemodules.com/active...ve-forums/ http://www.activemodules.com/active...nity-urls/



URL Master

As pointed out by Bruce Chapman of ifinity, you can find the latest compatibility information for URL Master at:

http://www.ifinity.com.au/Products/...ive+Social

Generally I find PageBlaster works in very well with AS and AF, with minimal exclusions required. I personally haven't found disabling redirects to be necessary, but I do add a couple of regex settings as per below:

Any request matching this Regex expression will not be rewritten:

/Users/|DesktopModules/|/Providers/|/LinkClick\.aspx
(/users is the user vanity url path. Note that /Groups does not seem to be required, and setting it can cause problems with Group Discussions)

Any request matching this Regex expression will not be generated as a Friendly Url:

/Social/Groups/tabid/(\w+)/as(.+)|/Social/Groups/tabid/(\w+)/ctl/(.+)
(/social/groups is the DNN path for my groups pages)

Posted By NFXBeats on 08 Dec 2010 10:27 PM
I had to give up on PB, but maybe I can revisit now. Have you had chance to test PB doing replaces on forum post text? I found that if the AJAx paging was used in AF, it would not process the replaces correctly when moving between a topics pages. In other words, Page 1 would replace just fine because it didn;t use AJAX. But page two text would get ignored because it was not processing through PB for some reason.

In testing today with vanity urls and AJAX enabled, I didn't seem to have any problems with text replacement. However I wasn't totally convinced that it was using AJAX for paging - may be to do with vanity urls as I observe essentially the same behaviour here.

Unfortunately with vanity URLs being IIS6 only I can't test it here but it would be extremely funny to me if AJAX had to be turned off for vanity URLs to work.

This would be a good post to pin.

For anyone using the free version of iFinity friendlyURL rewriter, I found that the only thing I had to change (other than ordering the modules correctly, was to change this entry in the provider entry to redirectUnfriendly="false" from true. I didn't have to exclude anything....yet. We'll see if I run into any problems down the road.

Hmmm.....

Interesting. I've actually got it set to true. However, I'm using extensionless url's, so this may play a difference in comparison to your config. One of the big key's here is the "usebasefriendly" also.

DNN 5.6.1
IIS 7 integrated
iFinityFUL



If you run into problems or need assistance, pm me or setup a post. I'm also using the AF vanity urls without issue.

Has anyone here been able to get UVG/Neat Upload to work properly? I don't want to disable the progress bar. That's a huge usability problem in my opinion.

Thanks!

Posted By TotalGolf on 29 Mar 2011 04:39 PM
Has anyone here been able to get UVG/Neat Upload to work properly? I don't want to disable the progress bar. That's a huge usability problem in my opinion.

Thanks!

It's been a while since I've worked with either, but if I remember right, in the past, it had to do with how they are ordered in the web.config.

I vaguely remember having to remove neatupload to get the sit to run.

Posted By Steven Webster on 06 Apr 2011 09:39 PM
I vaguely remember having to remove neatupload to get the sit to run.

Same over here. Would it be possible to have the upload done with the RAD upload tool or isn't that included in the DNN Framework? If it is included why don't use module developers it?

Jeff, does that mean you have them all working together? I've tried many orders with no luck.

My own advice is to forgo the progress bar. It's not compatible with Integrated mode, and hence my advice above to set NeatUpload with

useHttpModule="false"

The real solution is for Pengsten to modify UVG to use the Telerik progress bar, something which I've asked for but which I believe he's not yet done. It's built into the DNN Telerik controls.

@TotalGolf,

I haven't used any of the recent UVG releases, not since around the UVG 2.x days. But I do know the site I was working on, moving neatupload to the top of httpmodules corrected the issue.

And, of course, this was in classic mode. Not in integrated mode as Matt has pointed out.

Ok. Thanks. Since I need to use Integrated Mode, I guess I'm stuck following Matt's advice. I will ask Pengsten about it too.

I have contacted Pengsten about adding the Telerik upload control to UVG. Would anyone be willing to contribute towards the cost of implementation?

Matt/NFXBeats, I asked Pengsten to look into using the RadUpload control. He was researching the web and found several items, such as the one below, that lead him to believe he can't use radupload in community edition. He asked me for reference material that could show otherwise and help him perform the integration. Can you provide direction?

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community...fault.aspx

I've taken a look and it appears that that advice is still current. In addition, the NeatUpload build on Codeplex was last updated in January 2011 and it looks as though it may have an issue with the current version of DNN.

I guess Pengsten could pay for a Telerik license which would entitle him to use this and other controls. Alternatively he could contact the current maintainer of Neatupload and ask for a build that works with Integrated mode - or of course change the source himself for compatibility.

What do you think the odds that getting neatupload to work in Integrated Mode would allow everything to work together?

Sorry for the delay. I reckon that's all that is needed. Every other component checks out - just the neatupload part.

If I were a developer I'd happily grab the source and try to work it out

So I revisited this while changing the site over to run on ASP.NET 4.0. Again updating the post in full.
The good news is that it looks like I can get the progress bar to work.

Some past versions of PageBlaster had issues with compression, particular with Javascript and CSS files having the last byte truncated. I still utilise IIS 7 compression rather than PageBlaster's, but you should be okay if you can't use this.

For those of you who want to use products like Snapsis Pageblaster and iFinity URL Master with your Active Social and Active Forums installations, this advice may prove of benefit in addition to the helpful guidance already provided by Active Modules.

I also include NeatUpload in this because it can cause issues if running on your site in integrated mode. NeatUpload is presently used by UltraVideoGallery (UVG). The idea here is to allow interoperability between what is essentially 4 different URL handlers (and an upload handler, if you use UVG), while still allowing your site to get the benefits of all, especially Pageblaster's caching and compression. I don't get paid to promote these - it's just that I use them on my site.

With respect to versions, you should be running URL Master 2.4.3 or newer, Pageblaster 3.6.1 or newer, and the current versions of Active Social and Active Forums. I found that the version of Pageblaster in particular is very important to achieve reliable result

The following assumes that you run your IIS 7 application pool in Integrated mode; Classic mode is not recommended, and IIS 6 is not supported by the Active Forums URL Rewriter.


Changes to web.config

1. Within the system.webServer section, modify the following:

modules

to

modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"

2. Use the following load order for modules:

ForumsRewriter
SocialRewriter
ScriptModule
RequestFilter
UrlRewrite (either the DNN or Pageblaster module)
UploadHttpModule (this is NeatUpload, used by Ultra Video Gallery)
Pageblaster
Exception
UsersOnline
DNNMembership
Personalization
Analytics
RadUploadModule

3. Find the IIS Compression config within the system.webServer section (or modify using the GUI).  Ensure it is set to:

urlCompression doStaticCompression="true" doDynamicCompression="true"

Note: This should be set to false for both if you will use Snapsis compression.

4. Within system.webServer, insert the following (with enclosing  tag for each line)

      customHeaders
        remove name="Vary"
        /remove
        add name="Vary" value="Accept-Encoding"
        /add
      /customHeaders


5. In the NeatUpload section, further down in web.config, make sure the following is set:

useHttpModule="true"

This will enable the upload bar which should now work properly in integrated mode.


Snapsis.PageBlaster.Config

1. At minimum, include the following setting in excludePaths:

path pathern=".*" excludeFrom="Compression"
path pattern="(dnncore|jquery\.min\.js)" excludeFrom="All"

Note: Set the .* line only if using IIS compression. If using PageBlaster compression, you can comment out the following:

path pattern="\.js$" excludeFrom="All"

2. Comment the lines:

path pattern="\.js$" excludeFrom="MergeJS"

and

path pattern="\.css$" excludeFrom="MergeCSS"

3. Uncomment the line:

path pattern="(Web|Script)Resource" excludeFrom="All"



Optimising IIS

i have created a blog post with general optimisations for IIS which are useful with these settings, including fine tuning of IIS compression. You can read it at http://www.autechheads.com/blogs/en...x-websites

I hope this is of assistance. Naturally Active Modules has nothing to do with this config and can't easily provide support. However you may find the following topics of particular assistance for AS and AF:

http://www.activemodules.com/active...nity-urls/

URL Master

As pointed out by Bruce Chapman of ifinity, you can find the latest compatibility information for URL Master at:

http://www.ifinity.com.au/Products/...ive+Social



Generally I find PageBlaster works in very well with AS and AF, with minimal exclusions required. I personally haven't found disabling redirects to be necessary, but I do add a couple of regex settings as per below:

Any request matching this Regex expression will not be rewritten:

/Users/|DesktopModules/|/Providers/|/LinkClick\.aspx
(/users is the user vanity url path. Note that /Groups does not seem to be required, and setting it can cause problems with Group Discussions)

Any request matching this Regex expression will not be generated as a Friendly Url:

/Social/Groups/tabid/(\w+)/as(.+)|/Social/Groups/tabid/(\w+)/ctl/(.+)
(/social/groups is the DNN path for my groups pages)v

One note on this: after applying the order of Neatupload before Pageblaster, you will get a HTTP 500 after installing a new module, when returning to the Extensions list. This does not appear to be an issue beyond a one-off exception.

Matt, this is terrific content. Thanks for sharing! Just out of curiosity...are you using PageBlaster's script combination and minification features?

Hi Steven,

Thanks :-) Yes, I'm using the minify capabilities. I had a problem with a previous version of PageBlaster which truncated the last byte from the file with compression, but this has been fixed. I still use IIS compression regardless, but the minification has been working fine. I'm also finding this still works fine with Cloudflare, which has its own minification capabilities. Using the two together seems to be the ideal solution from my testing.

Cheers,

Matt

Cloudflare looks really interesting. Sort of a CDN based security and web cache/acceleration solution. I wonder how that handles dynamic data changes within AS/AF.

Seems to do well. Rocket Loader doesn't work well with ActiveSocial's javascript, but it's not on by default and I've suggested changes to allow it to be better handled.