Written by:
Thursday, June 18, 2009 

Why #7???

Hi,

My entire life, #7 has been my lucky number. Today I find out that I am the 7th member to join the blogging community on the DNN Dev website.  I would like to take the opportunity to say what a pleasure it is to be blogging on this forum and within this community.  As this is my first blog on this forum, I thought I would introduce myself and my background. I promise I won’t be too long!

Andrew Teh and I own operate a Brisbane Web Design, consultancy and marketing firm in Australia.  My involvement with the DotNetNuke project started in January 2007, around the time of the release of DNN 4.1.  While I haven’t been working with the DotNetNuke project for very long, I’m a huge advocate of the platform.  DotNetNuke is enormously dynamic and provides a wonderful platform to build websites, Intranets, Extranet, client information systems and more.  While DotNetNuke is a superb platform, there has always been a part of me that was getting frustrated with the time to develop even a simple module; and that’s when I found XMod. 

For those of you who have not created a DotNetNuke module, you need to (take a deep breath) design and develop the database tables and schema, move onto the data access layer, create the business layer before finally moving onto the User Interface.  Once you have finally completed your basic feedback form and several hours later, you can finally compile the application. Surprise surprise, there’s an error!  My response at this stage has always been “which layer is the problem in?”  Now you are faced with this ridiculous task of trawling through your code, looking for your mistake.  (create your own DotNetNuke Module).  Even if you are a pretty good coder, getting used to the DotNetNuke syntax can take you months and even years to become efficient in module development.  On the other hand, there is XMod…

Xmod

It doesn’t take long to get addicted to the XMod platform.  All the hard work has been done for you, and all you need to do is develop the User Interface.  Even when you’re developing the User Interface, you don’t need to add the Inherits and ‘Codefile’ statements at the start of each page.

XMod does have restrictions and unfortunately, one size does not fit all.  If you don’t already know this, XMod stores the data in a couple of predefined tables. The simplest way to describe the table is that XMod stores the dates vertically rather horizontally.  This is fantastic in some respects as I can build a feedback from in XMod in less than 5 minutes.  The bad part is if you are building a corporate application, XMod is simply not made to do this.  The traditional tables to store a feedback form would look a bit like this.

Where XMod would store this data as

 Both tables achieve the same thing, except when you want to start doing reporting, the ball game has changed.

Kelly has always said from day 1 that XMod was originally designed for small applications.  But, as projects grow, requirements change and users demand control over their data. Here is where XMod Pro comes in. 

XMod Pro

XMod Pro has the ability to manage data in your own custom tables and interact in a more traditional form.  This has certainly got the DotNetNuke community buzzing.  With the XMod Pro 1.1 version currently available, it has certainly been a success with impressive flexibility and scalability, XMod Pro is the most impressive module I have ever seen.  XMod Pro truly is the missing module to the core framework in DotNetNuke.

Our company still creates its own modules for many of our clients due to the complex projects.  XMod Pro might one day change this as the platform matures and evolves into the most impressive module for the most popular Microsoft framework available.  XMod and XMod Pro certainly have a bight future.

In My Spare Time

My involvement with Kelly these days is in the form of Xmod Pro Video Tutorials and code examples.  My newly created website offers video tutorials and code examples for people who are trying to build DotNetNuke Modules in XMod Pro, but would like a little bit of a helping hand.  Each project comes with a resource zip file to allow the subscribers to download and implement the tutorial material immediately into their project.  Videos are released each month and subscribers have the ability to make requests on what they would like to see in an upcoming video tutorial.

Coding modules in XMod Pro is easy and actually fun when you start seeing immediate results on the page.  I hope I am able to offer something back to the community that has served me well.  Stay tuned for more information about XMod Pro as I will be posting as much and as often as I can on this forum.

- Ryan Scherer (ryanscherer50)

Trackback Print

Tags:

Categories:

Location: Blogs Ryan Scherer