Continuing in the line of blog posts that help extend the ease of DNN management, today's post on DNN Enhancement is our Portal Manager template for XMod Pro.

As a development company with tons of DotNetNuke sites out there for our clients, we've found that we often will have situations where the standard features or admin screens of DNN don't give us what we need to quickly edit or review several things at once... here, I'm specifically talking about reviewing sites with tons of portals.

This administration utility provides an improved listing of all portals within a DNN instance. At a glance on one screen, you can see quick information such as numbers of pages, number of modules and top domain alias, etc.

Not every DNN instance that we work on has 10 portals in it. But for the ones that do have 10, 25, or 80+ portals in one DotNetNuke instance, reviewing information in the Host > Portals (or Host > Site Management as it's known now) DNN page can be painful. The core DNN page is a basic utility. It does not allow you to set how many portals to show on one page before paginating, does not allow you to sort or search and has limited data displayed.

Whenever MooreCreative sees a DNN admin or utility item that needs work... which is normally discovered after we've shouted down the hall at each other, complaining about how we can't stand XYZ about some core DNN admin feature that is limiting in a particular circumstance and someone else shouts back, "hey, why don't you make your own XYZ in XMod Pro and stop complaining?" Well, that's when the eureka moment happens and we decide that we should build a better element with XMod Pro! We have developed this DNN Administration Enhancement out of our direct use of this XMod Pro code on client DNN instances with multiple portals (one with 244+ portals) to help us better manage and review portal information.

Benefits & Features:

This administration utility provides a listing of all portals within a DNN instance. At a glance you can see quick information such as numbers of pages, number of modules and top domain alias. Remember, since it is built with XMod Pro code, you can easily edit and customize the module as needed!

• Easy to review all of the portals on the DNN instance on one screen
• You can set pagination and search as needed
• Easily edit the list to include details/queries that you need to review and compare across portals (as an example we needed to see the total number of modules across each portal as an indication of whether setup of that portal was complete)
• With the EDIT form, quickly make basic changes to Portal data such as Title, Logo/Icon, Copyright, etc.
• Quick link to the top domain name/alias for each portal
• Quickly see who is setup as the administrator for each portal
• Expand and customize as needed! You can change the columns to include other information such as number of users, articles, anything!

Download the Code - At The DNN Store

In past blog posts, I've posted a series of blocks of code for you to follow and produce the template, form, etc. But now that we've prepared these as XMod Pro Module Kits, I have them posted on the DotNetNuke Store for download. They are FREE offerings and I hope you can use them to better manage your DNN site and to see what kind of additions and enhancements to the DNN system tools you can make on your own!

http://store.dnnsoftware.com/home/product-details/dnn-portal-review-manager-for-xmod-pro

Do let me know by posting comments and questions below, though, if you'd like for me to put back into blog posts like this, more of the thoughts, instructions and notes on the items in the manager, I'll be glad to... otherwise, download, install, and start playing with the code directly!

Enjoy The Results

Now, at a glance, you can review all of the portals/sites of the DNN instance on one page and at-a-glance audit the things you need to know about each portal. Sort, Filter, Search... all there and massively important when you have tons of portals!

Some note for further development:

I think you'll find that when we're preparing an XMOD item like this, we're putting together the quick and dirty code to get it working fast. There are always improvements and additions that can be made to things like this... we've used it a time or two now in this state and haven't desperately needed new items, but we have had a few ideas. I would love to see your thoughts and ideas for additions too!

Thanks for reading everyone, I hope you try out the tool and get some use out of it!

Ryan - MooreCreative

MooreCreative XMOD Development Blog

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.