Module Development

As many of you may know, I work closely with the development team at Engage on various projects. One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen is that developers use <br /> (BR) to create padding between elements. Sometimes, I see big chuck of BR element being used across just to create a larger padding between their elements. This isn’t new to many developers; I often see it in many commercial modules we bought as well. If you find yourself doing this religiously and not know what it means ...

Rating is something that I have never seen anybody in DotNetNuke community has done it right. It might sounds pretty extreme, but if you have seen something that provide values as what I am going to discuss in this blog, please feel free to direct me there. I sometimes run into modules (whether if it is free or commercial) that provide rating ability on articles or products in a way that is… somewhat useless to visitors. Things like five-star-rating is one of most common mistake I’ve seen aroun...

While helping with the content for our DotNetNuke OpenForce Post Training Conference, I came up with a tongue-in-cheek (yet still kind of serious) listing of symptoms of a flawed DNN module development process. Recognize any of these? Your latest DNN module utilizes in-line CSS like it was going out of style. You frequently need to release new versions due to changes that consist solely of updates to hard coded strings in your code-behind. Every time you implement your modules a...

When creating a DNN module, you have the option to choose from the web site project (WSP), or a web application project (WAP). I prefer the web application project approach, and I'll explain it for developers who are new to module development, or unfamiliar with the WAP approach for developing modules. There are two major reasons why I feel WAP is generally better than WSP for DNN module development. 1. Conciseness - the project contains only your module's code, nothing more. Separating your m...