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HomeHomeDevelopment and...Development and...Open Core Testi...Open Core Testi...DNN 7.0 CTP Notes (part 1)DNN 7.0 CTP Notes (part 1)
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9/25/2012 8:53 AM
 
Jay Mathis wrote:
Sebastian Leupold wrote:
regarding 7) I might have mis-explained. There had been concepts from other Core Team members to allow each module package to contain templates, which should show up in the module selection instead of definitions. Consider Form and List module -which could add items like "Contact Form", "Feedback Form", "Cooking Reciepts", "Image Gallery"... which get logically grouped by "Forms" (together with DNN Feedback module), "Lists", "Galleries" etc.

 OK... but as long as there are multiple definitions, it would nice if there was a way to instantiate a single definition without instantiating all of them.

Currently, it is a decision made by the module developer - he either might use separate modules or same module with multiple definitions.


Cheers from Germany,
Sebastian Leupold

dnnWerk - The DotNetNuke Experts   German Spoken DotNetNuke User Group

Speed up your DNN Websites with TurboDNN
 
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9/25/2012 10:17 AM
 
I agree with a lot of what Jay is saying. In my business I need to train people on using DNN and few of them ever really get it, but 7 is looking much better. Here are a few more thoughts:

When adding a module, there are three categories, "Admin", "Common" and "All". It is very seldom that you need to add an admin module to a page so the categories should be:
- Admin Modules
- Content Modules - All modules that are not Admin modules (could find a better name)
- Common Modules - Could also be called Favorites
- All Modules

When adding a module to a page a user is presented with so many modules, it is overwhelming. When adding a module to a page it should be easier to determine what content pane to add it to. Perhaps when adding a module and you click on the module tile, you are shown the content panes and you click on the one where you want the module to go.

This is a suggestion that you might find unorthodox, but I think the word "modules" should be dropped in favour of "apps". When I explain conceptually how DNN works, my student seems to understand the word App, where module makes them initially confused until I tell them "Modules are like Apps". Wordpress uses Plugins, I think that is also a better description of what modules are.

We are quickly exiting the cursor age (mouse pointer). All hover actions should be replaced with click to view drop-down. Look at the big sites: Google, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, you don't find hover, it is all but gone. If you stay with all these hover actions, DNN will look a generation behind. The DnnRadEditor does not use hovers, be consistent.

Back to naming, "Pages" is a bit confusing too, because when adding a page my students expect that the page will actually do something where it does not do anything until you add a module to it. Perhaps it should be called "Menu Administration" or "Navigation" because often when you add a page it is not even a page but a link to another page.

I understand what modules and pages are and what they do, but I have been in deep with DNN since version 3. It is hard to understand how difficult it is for new people to grasp until you spend an hour teaching them and then watching over their shoulder.
 
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9/25/2012 11:21 AM
 

Hi Mike,

If it helps, you can create and manage your own categories. Mitchell Sellers has a very recent blog post about that actually... http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/B...

Still, I think the categories could be made a little more useful. I actually submitted a request to Gemini to along those lines. It would help a lot if we could apply a category to a module while installing it... Otherwise, the process of assigning categories can get a little tedious.

Mike

 
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9/25/2012 2:09 PM
 
Sebastian Leupold wrote:
Jay Mathis wrote:
Sebastian Leupold wrote:
regarding 7) I might have mis-explained. There had been concepts from other Core Team members to allow each module package to contain templates, which should show up in the module selection instead of definitions. Consider Form and List module -which could add items like "Contact Form", "Feedback Form", "Cooking Reciepts", "Image Gallery"... which get logically grouped by "Forms" (together with DNN Feedback module), "Lists", "Galleries" etc.

 OK... but as long as there are multiple definitions, it would nice if there was a way to instantiate a single definition without instantiating all of them.

Currently, it is a decision made by the module developer - he either might use separate modules or same module with multiple definitions.

Deploying a solution as multiple modules was a work around that evolved over time BECAUSE there is no way to instantiate a single definition of a module package.   To get around the issue I am stating, module developers instead started creating multiple modules, each with a single definition!  This is precisely the issue!  That is not how the architecture (multiple module definitions) was intended to be used, but that is how it has evolved over the last 10 years.

So again, as long as DNN supports the concept of multiple definitions within a single module package, it would nice if there was a way to instantiate a single definition without instantiating all of them. 

I'm not sure if your trying to make a point or just playing devil's advocate, but it seems like you are arguing against the idea that a user should be able to select a single definition to be instantiated and I fail to see why you are arguing that way.

 
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9/25/2012 2:18 PM
 
Mike Cox makes a lot of very good points. For those of us that have been around since the beginning (1.02 for me) and seen DNN evolve of the last 10 years, it is easy to forget how DNN looks through the eyes of a newcomer. We are used to the little quirks and have come to overlook some of the issues that have been around since the beginning.

I also do a lot of DNN training for my consulting business and there are ALOT of UX design flaws that constantly trip people up because they just aren't as intuitive as they should be. I also have participated in a many CMS software selection projects where DNN was being compared to SiteFinity, Ektron, et al and I can tell you from first hand observation how business decision makers react when they see a very nice polished UX from one of these other vendors and then flounder around trying to find the similar functionality in DNN.

We have a golden opportunity right now to revamp the UX and fix some of these issues. We can either pay attention to what the end users are saying about the product and address them, OR we can continue making excuses for why it was designed a certain way, why it would be too hard, etc etc and just bury our heads in the sand and hope end users overlook the shortcomings.

 
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