Since it's initial release, XMod Pro (XMP) for DotNetNuke (DNN) has been keeping to a pretty regular schedule of a significant release every month – in addition to more frequent maintenance releases. Since all XMod Pro owners automatically have upgrade protection for one full year, all our customers and their clients have been enjoying the latest new features for free. This month is our biggest feature release yet.

Let's start with the most noticeable of the changes in this release.

New Inline Editor

The normal workflow for XMod Pro (XMP) is to create your basic template and/or form, test it out to see if it works and, if not, make changes and repeat. In version 1.4 we've listened to your feedback that, while editing in XMP is fairly quick, if you have a lot of changes or continually test, change, repeat, the current process for managing your templates and forms can get very repetitive.

The new Inline Editor should greatly simplify and speed your editing tasks.

Once you've configured an XMP module or XMP FormView module to use a form/template, XMP provides you with the "Host Options Panel" while viewing the module (i.e., you don't have to go to a configuration or management page to see it). The form and/or template is displayed as a hyperlink. Simply click the form/template name and the inline editor pops-up. Your template/form is displayed in the editor window, ready to be edited. When you're done. Click "Save" and you're done.

The editor is more than just a convenient pop-up. If you look closer (click the image above for a larger view). It comes complete with a toolbar. The toolbar allows you to make some text bold, insert a table, and some other standard HTML items. More importantly, it provides a couple of drop-down lists that contain the tokens, tags, and controls you can use in XMod Pro. Simply select the item you want and it is inserted into your form/template. We hope this speeds your editing chores and helps minimize typo's.

The inline editor is available only to Host/SuperUser users just like the Manage Forms and Manage Templates pages. It requires jQuery 1.3.2 to be registered on the page. For DNN 5+, this shouldn't be a problem since it is included by default in most sites. You may need to verify you're running a more recent version of the library though (DNN 5.0 included jQuery 1.2.6).

Unfortunately, DNN 4.x does not include jQuery. As a result, we almost didn't include it as an option. However, we have made it possible. You will need to enable the Host Options Panel on each XMP module you want to use it on. This is done on the Configure page in XMP. There you also can specify the URL from which to load the jQuery library (this only needs to be done in one module per page) if it isn't included already.

POSTed Value Persistence

In listening to our customers, we found that many of you were passing values to XMP via HTTP POST to initially filter your result set. For instance, you may pass-in "Chicago" to only show employees in that city. Once you've done that, you wanted to be able to search through those filtered results. In version 1.4, we've made that possible. To continue with our example, now you can search for all "Managers" and it will only retrieve managers in Chicago.

New Separator Template

When creating your displays, sometimes you want to simply provide a list of data – let's say a comma-delimited list of cities. In previous versions, you could create this list like this:

<ItemTemplate>[[City]], </ItemTemplate>

This works – kind-of. It will display a comma-delimited list of cities. However, it will end with a trailing comma: Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle,

With the new <SeparatorTemplate>, you can banish that straggling comma forever.

<ItemTemplate>[[City]]</ItemTemplate>

<SeparatorTemplate>, </SeparatorTemplate>

Now the cities will be rendered like this: Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle

It's a seemingly small addition, but it can be a big thing if you're dealing with some dangling separator. Note that like all templates, you can include HTML in this too. So, you could include <hr /> tags or anything you want to be placed between each record.

New Tokens

We've heard your requests for some additional data you can use to add flexibility to your layouts. So, we've added the following tokens to version 1.4:

• [[Module:TabId]] – returns the DNN Tab ID on which the module resides – handy for constructing links.


• [[Portal:Alias]] – returns the domain of the current portal.


• [[Portal:TimeZoneOffset]] – returns the offset from GMT for the current portal in minutes. Can be a positive or negative number.


• [[Portal:Expiry]] – The expiration date, if any, of the current portal.


• [[Portal:LoginTabId]] – The DNN Tab ID of the page that contains the Login control.


 

Other Stuff

In addition to the above changes, we've made some more mundane but no less useful changes to enhance error reporting as well as a few bug fixes that have been reported since the last release.

Thanks for all your great feedback. XMod Pro continues to grow and evolve to meet YOUR needs. I hope you enjoy the new release and I thank you for continuing to support XMod Pro.