As I mentioned on my homepage I have upgraded this site to DotNetNuke 4.4.1. Overall this was a very smooth process as the actual upgrade went off without ANY problems! For those of you not aware, when you are upgrading a DNN site you can place an app_offline.htm file in the root of your DNN Location and it will take your application offline. This is a VERY important feature for those of us with slow upload speeds to our web hosts!!
Now I will talk about major issues that I managed to create when I changed one setting and enabled one new feature! After setting up my portal I went in as my host user to Host -> Host Settings. Under the performance settings section I changed the page state option to "Memory" and then enabled the compression option as well. After making those settings everything appeared to be working flawlessly, the site was incredibly fast and I was very happy! That was until I tried to do anything administrative as my admin user or my host user. I tried editing page, site, and host settings and every time I tried to save them I received "Object reference not set to an instance of an object"
Since I believed the setting was related to compression I tried to turn it off and was unsuccessful. I turned to individuals on the DNN Forums and was able to get a hint that I could remove the following section from the HTTP Modules section of the config file. "<ADD name="Compression" type="DotNetNuke.HttpModules.Compression.HttpModule, DotNetNuke.HttpModules.Compression">" After making this change I went back to my site and logged in as Host. I restarted the application from the Host Settings page. After that, I went and turned off compression in the settings and also changed the page state to be stored on the page. After saving these updates I tried once again to edit a page on my portal. I still received the error I listed above.
Finally, I decided that maybe a bad page had been added into the cache, so I then went back to the host settings and cleared the cache! Now everything is working!! Hopefully, the DNN team will fix the issue soon, but until then I do not recommend the use of either of those options!!