These are features that were orginally planned for DNN 5 - I think - but those features may be a long way off.

So right now if you want each user to have their own "home page"  and the ability to add modules, edit the page, etc. there are some hacks to get it to work but not without some manual labor (to my knowledge). To do this you would add a page to the site and set the permissions then use a third party traffic director module such as those from dnnspired.com or ucanuse. To redirect them to their page on log-in - dnnspired also has an additional module that comes with it that allows the user to decide if they want redirected to their home page, the site's home page etc.

You would then have to install the free TRT control panel from http://www.davebuckner.com/Default.aspx?tabid=56  which is a pretty cool control panel to do alot of differnet things. This control panel will allow you to choose which modules a user would be allowed to add to a page - otherwise they would see all modules in the portal and some of those you may not want the user to have access to!

As far as auto generating new pages with permissions set, as far as I know, there is no way to do this right now.

As far as the DNN Personalization API I would be interested in hearing more about that.  You can also do some dynamic stuff with Xmod. i.e. Have a button called "go to my home page" that takes the user to a page where everything on the page changes to the current users items - events, document downloads, whatever you want to build into to it. This way there is only one actual page.

Hi Elie,

I would also like to provide my users with this personalization feature. Here, for what it's worth, is the limited information that I've been able to find so far:

• iflaker.com is built using DNN and seems to provide the ability to drag and drop modules. I think it reads and writes cookies to persist a user's environment across different browsing sessions. It would also be nice to be able to have the user log on and pick up their configuration that way. I don't think, though, that this is being offered except as a host. In other words, if you want to provide your users this capability you have to move your community over to their hosting service the way you do with Ning.com and KickApps.com,
• dropthings.com is an open source package that you can pick up and use for your own site. It is developed by the developer of pageflakes.com and described in his book: Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 (Omar Al Zabir). It is a book well worth picking up IMHO. Dropthings was created as basically an exercise to help you to move through the book and he warns you that it's not a scalable / robust solution. Also, as it is written on ASP 3.5 rather than a DNN foundation, I'm not sure how easy it would be to integrate.
• other similar portals with home page personalization seem to be heavily based on javascript. If going this route, I would seriously consider the OpenSocial framework as a foundation to enable the ability to use widgets developed for other OpenSocial-conforming portals (including Google). This, however, doesn't necessarily use either DNN nor ASP.Net. Whereas different platforms seem to have created their own widget/module/web part environments, resulting in a fragmented space, it seems that OpenSocial is an attempt to begin bridging across at least some website islands to bring a consistent experience to users and module/widget/web part developers. Google's recent moves towards the development of a more robust Javascript environment may strengthen moves in this area.

Please note that I am relatively new to this and still learning and so distrust what I've written above unless others can verify, as these are just my own uninformed observations so far.

I understand that this feature is being worked on for the next version of DNN but I'm not sure of its expected release target date. I think, though, that given the increasing popularity of this functionality that creating yet another 'stove-pipe' home-page personalization infrastructure could be counter-productive. Ideally, one that enabled this personalization using DNN modules while still easing the ability of users to bring in their OpenSocial widgets (and/or Sharepoint web parts) from other sites would be a major break-through both for users and the DNN community. I don't know, however, how possible/practical this would be.

I would, however, like to hear comments and thoughts from others more knowledgeable than me in this space as well as what others searching for this feature have found to date.

Cheers

Bill