I posted this in reference to the deprecating of the the Contacts Module in favor of the UDT. And figured I should post it here as well...

On the deprecation of Contacts, While I think your right that you can better implement contacts through UDT, I think there is a lot of value in having Contacts appear as one of the modules in the Module dropdown. A lot of the users of DNN are not all the technical or even creative, and the idea of using the UDT for contacts just won't occur to them.

Perhaps the best solution is to somehow allow UDTs to be exported as a module. That could result in a huge number of great modules, with very little additional code having to be written.

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David O'Leary
Efficion Consulting

While I think there should be some core modifications to make this type of thing easier, I'm pretty sure it could be done without core mods. If you added a new class with a placeholder in the ascx file and the ability to load a configuation file in the code behind (with basically the same info as used for the IPortable export but without the data, just the structure). Then you create the module zip containing: the .dnn file setting the new class as it's view file and the config file. They would have to already have UDT installed.

The only thing left would be to decide whether to always load the structure from the config file or to import that into the UDT tables and treat it as a normal UDT module.

This is just a couple minutes of thinking about this so I'm probably missing some stuff but I could also use this same idea for specialized versions of my Advanced DataGrid and my Articles module. If only I had the time...

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David O'Leary
Efficion Consulting