To kick off this new XMOD blog, I wanted to start off with a bit of an introduction to myself, my development company, and our history with XMOD. In the end, the purpose of this blog is to share our tips, ideas and experience using XMOD PRO as we help promote XMOD with the DNN Community and help share in the interactions of the great XMOD community.
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About Moore Creative - DNN Integrators
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The Moore Creative Company is a web development company located near Charlotte, North Carolina. Often working as the "internal development team," for other developers, design shops, and ad agencies and marketing firms, Moore Creative often works with other's designs and projects to wrap-up the job with excellent, cross-browser compatible, design-focused website development in DotNetNuke.
We are also a Bronze Sponsor of DotNetNuke, and love to give back to the community whether through DNN User Group participation, DNN education, promotion, etc. We help out DNN users, administrators and developers where we can by actively participating in the blogs and module community websites that we work with. Look for our tips and advice in the XMOD Pro support forums (I'm user Ryan Moore in the forum) as well as other DNN/Module forums, and let us know if we can help you out.
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About Ryan Moore - Writing The Blog
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I began with ActionScript in Flash in 1998 (actually earlier in HyperCard!) and progressed from Graphic Designer to Developer in the decade that followed. Very familiar with PHP, at home with JS and DHTML, and years and years of Classic ASP and VB / SQL, I know of different languages and approaches. When I want to get something done, I'll often get there, overcoming one obstacle or another, regardless of whether it's clean and elegant code.
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MooreCreative + XMOD
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We've been working in DNN since our first install with DNN 3.1. Once we got to our third or perhaps fourth DNN client site, we had researched heavily whether we wanted to get into the module development business. It seemed that we were always running into a situation where one or perhaps two modules did part of what we needed, but none did everything, or allowed for full customization or styling like we needed. Some of my crew began to get experienced in hacking and editing the source of modules whenever possible so that we could achieve the edits and styles/functions that client projects desired. Another began working on, and over time, prepared a module or two that we still use on occasion.
Dustin and I researched and ran across an early module called "Nukelet" which allowed you to essentially inject any scripting language into your DNN pages. You could put in Classic ASP, PHP, .NET, etc. and while it seemed like a promising idea, it was quickly realized that it opened security concerns and was rough. I'm not sure, but I don't believe that it stayed on the market long.
But, that did start us looking for something else... something that we could use from within DNN to do MORE. Something that we could use to turn DNN from a fantastic content management system into what it is now for us, our primary Application Development Platform (I believe I picked up that title from a Nina Meiers article).
We worked with our first two XMOD (standard) projects, and then quickly our first projects with XMOD PRO 1. It was soon clear to me that we never needed to look for anything else. If a module doesn't already exist that does 100% exactly what we need, then I know that we can either build it from scratch with XMOD PRO, or we can augment that module with helper modules from XMOD to make it do exactly what we need.
I remember one all-nighter, finishing the code for one of our first XMOD PRO integrations, and after really soaking in the help file examples, and having created perhaps four or five different templates and forms, my mind split open and I flipped-out... realizing that ultimately there wasn't anything in the world that a client could bring us that we couldn't build fantastically through XMOD PRO.
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MooreCreative XMOD PRO Development Blog
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In the MooreCreative XMOD PRO Development Blog, I'll try to share some of the thoughts and ideas that we've come up with on a day-to-day basis as my development company uses DNN + XMOD PRO to tackle client projects. I'll include items such as tips/tricks, did-you-know articles, troubleshooting/testing examples as well as posting samples solutions and explanations behind our experience working with XMOD and jQuery functions, PageBlaster, ZLDNN Article, and other modules/elements.
If you would like to see us tackle a topic, especially anything out of the forums that could use further examples, please, don't hesitate to
email me, and I'll look into preparing it for a blog post.
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