Hi All,

Our team are currently in the process of gearing up to replace our existing CMS with a DotNetNuke installation. It was exciting to see how much functionality is available out of the box however one aspect of the system really appear a little weak to us and this is the area of Page Management.  Specifically we have a workflow in our current in house developed CMS where by a content editor can log in,  navigate to a point in the site-map hierarchy (which in turns maps to a content hierarchy)  right click on a node and generate a new content page. 

The new content page is "Hierarchially aware!"  in that it knows to inherit it's parent's settings and meta-data etc.  Also the correct page template and modules are pre loaded and all the content editor then has to do is add the content and publish and this new page appears on the live site in the correct place in the hierarchy with all required settings/skins etc inherited. 

The problem with DotNetNuke (from the perspective of our workflow)  is that when you create a new page it's created in the ether to some extent. A user needs to be an admin, create the page and then understand all the settings required to associated it to a parent page , specify skin etc etc.  A seperator user in an editor role then logs in , navigates to the page and then edit's.

Ideally we would like to have a treeview like control which, when logged in as an editor , gives you limited access to page admin functionality  in that it allows you to specify a point in the hierarchy where the new page will be created and all settings are inherited from the parent unless subsequently overriden at the new  page level.

Now i've searched for a few days on this and there doesn't appear to be something commercial or community based that currently offers this type of functionality. I have seen Telerik's Page Admin Module based on their treeview control but i believe you still need to be logged in as an Admin and it doesn't quiet cover the breadth of desired functionality that i've described?

I'm looking at having to write a custom module to tie the navigation and page admin functionality together and would love to hear people's thoughts on this,  alternative approaches? it's been done before? You're Mad    Any advice recommendations would be greatly appreciated as as a dev team we're definitely DotNetNuke newbies!

Finally one last point to mention for context, we're currently playing with version 4.9.3 with a view to moving to 5.1 as soon as it clears beta, so maybe any thoughts you have might bear that in mind.

Thanks and sorry for the long post!

Paul Griffin

Thanks Sebastian,

Ya i actually had a conversation with Cathal Connolly about this and he explained to me that 5.1 will have much more granular control over admin functionality which is great to hear. I suppose our pressing need is this ability to create pages "in context" at a specific point in a hierarchy of pages.  So from a UI / User experience perspective this is probably most easilty and intuitively implemented via  a treeview where u drill down to the level of the hierarchy you want , right click and choose "new page" !

I'm going to try exhaust Teleriks effort first and if that doesn't suffice i'll have a go at the custom module, it'll be my first effort so if i go down that route i'll update this post with my progress!

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

Paul.