One of my career mission statements is to learn something every day. One of the reasons I started this blog is to supplement my faulty memory by giving me a place to document things I pickup, observe, and muse about on a semi-irregular basis.

I figure, why not make an effort to document some of the small learnings from each day in my blog. At the very least it will help me to retain these learnings. Maybe someone else will learn from me. Most likely, I'll come back to these posts because a month later I'll blank on something I know I should know.

Today, I have two take-aways that are totally unrelated.

1. FATA  is different than Fatah. Wow, this really helps me sort things out. I never realized FATA was a separate entity from Fatah.

An really FATA is not an entity. Its an acronym (Federally Administered Tribal Areas). An article on Morning Edition helped clarify this for me today. FATA is basically out of the Pakistani government's control. The area borders Afghanistan and is home to the Pashtun people.

Fatah is a Palestinian political faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Without going through all details of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict I guess I'll just list out the keywords for future recall - Fatah's adversary is Hamas (to be black and white), Yasser Arafat, West Bank. This doesn't do the depth and complexity of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but that's not the point of my learning today.

2. Not really a learning, but more of a different way to thing about things. When login is constrained to a small number of users I typically recommend removing the Login skin object fron the skin in DNN and just use ?ctl=login. Today, I learned about using the login skin object in the Control Panel. By adding the following code to the control panels user control you can incorporate the logoff link in the control panel.

<%@ Control language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" Explicit="True" Inherits="DotNetNuke.UI.ControlPanels.IconBar" CodeFile="IconBar.ascx.vb" >

Additionally, you'll need to add the skin object for login to the user control after registering the control with the Control Panel. So include the following in your markup.

<dnn:login runat="server" id="dnnLOGIN">

Another way to do this would be to include the login control in the skin but surround it with code to make the control only visible to specific user roles (Registered Users orin the case below Administrators). Again the control will need to be registered in your skin files.

<%if (DotNetNuke.Security.PortalSecurity.IsInRole(DotNetNuke.Common.Globals.GetPortalSettings().AdministratorRoleName)){%>
<dnn:login runat="server" id="dnnLOGIN">
<% } %>

Finally, you can use the boring ?ctl=logoff, but that wouldn't be as much fun.