For the DotNetNuke Connections conference last month I provided an advanced DotNetNuke module development course as a pre-conference training session. That training covered details on how to implement some of the newer features in the DotNetNuke platform within custom modules, mainly ContentItem integration and Taxonomy features.
For the course I created a very basic Article module for DotNetNuke, ultimately naming it DNNSimpleArticle. For the course I created both a C# and a VB.NET version of the module. Since that course offering I’ve cleaned things up a bit more in the module and just tonight uploaded it to Codeplex at http://dnnsimplearticle.codeplex.com.
Keep in mind a few things before I talk about the features of the module.
- This module is not supported! (use at your own risk)
- This module is free.
- This module is released under the same MIT license that DotNetNuke is licensed.
- This module has seen limited testing, use at your own risk
- This module is compiled against DNN 5.5.1, it will not install and run on an older version without a recompile.
- The initial release has both C# and VB.NET code but future releases will likely only be released as C#.
Here’s a brief summary of the module. It’s a very basic module for creating articles (title, description,body) and has the ability to assign articles with the DotNetNuke Taxonomy functionality. It also provides some simple SEO functionality by defining the HTML page title, description and keywords when an individual article is loaded in the view mode.
This module provides the following functionality
- Create and display articles
- Display a paged list of articles
- Articles get created as DNN ContentItems
- Categorization provided through DNN Taxonomy
- SEO functionality for article display providing HTML Title, Meta-Description and Meta-Keyword functionality
- Dynamically loaded Controls for ArticleList and ArticleView based on ArticleId parameter in the querystring
- Displays list of Categories below Article on ArticleDisplay, this list Links to the SearchResults page passing in the Category as the TAG parameter to display in the list.
- Compiled against DNN 5.5.1 (if you want to run against an older version you will have to recompile it)
- Uses MSBuild for automated packaging (requires MSBuildTasks from http://msbuildtasks.tigris.org/) (check out this blog post for a bit of info/video on the msbuild)
I’m currently running the module on a DNN website I setup recently at http://www.sccaforums.com/ it’s providing the front page news for now. There are obviously still some things that can be tweaked for the module, and also with that site in general, but it is functioning well and has been indexed rather well by search engines in the two weeks it has been running there.
I’ll be blogging over the next couple of days with more details on that website in particular, as it is a recent conversion from the CommunityServer platform to DotNetNuke. I have another codeplex project for the SQL Scripts used in that conversion process. The blog will talk about the process and hopefully provide some guidance to people interested in converting a website from CommunityServer to DNN.
Back to the module though: You can download the first release (labeled V00.00.03) from Codeplex.