DotNetNuke Telerik “Loading the dialog...”

If you’ve ever run into this issue, and it looks from a google search (or twenty) that no one else has run into this issue, it can be a frustrating one to track down.

Here’s the background. I had a PE customer who had some issues with their DotNetNuke website, after getting most of the issues resolved, there remained one nagging issue. If you tried to use the Image Manager, Document Manager, or Media Manager options in the Telerik RadEditor you would get a message that said “Loading the dialog” and looked like

It would sit there, never loading the dialog, never returning an error, and pretty much never do anything.

It took me a while, far too long, but I finally tracked down the issue! They had a setting in the web.config file that most DNN web.configs don’t have

<xhtmlConformance mode=“Legacy” />

I stumbled across the fix after deciding to completely swap the web.config file out, with a known good file from another DNN 5.5 install (obviously saving the connectionstrings and machinekey values from the original web.config). As soon as I did this the various Managers started to function properly. So then it was just a matter of doing a compare on the two web.config files, to see what was different.

The formatting was different, but the values for most settings were the same, until I stumbled on that setting. So I reverted back to the original web.config and commented out the setting

<!—<xhtmlConformance mode=“Legacy” />—>

What do you know? The damn thing started working! Woot!

So, if you ever run into the message in DotNetNuke “Loading the dialog…” while trying to use the Telerik Editor, check to see if your web.config file has an xhtmlConformance setting in it. I tested changing it from Legacy to Transitional and it starts to work as well.