I've argued this point with several developers in the DNN scene, but always hit a brick wall.
The case is that nearly all content publication scenarios (and what is a website if not basically a publication) require largely the same functions from the module, whether it is a blog, articles, announcements, news, pictures, events, just about anything really. They all share 90% of the same functionality or more. Developers seem to get stuck on building modules with a specific purpose in mind such as a blog, news, classifieds, real estate.. or whatever, when in fact they should be developing a collection of functionality and leave the specific use of those functions up to those who are building the sites.
Currently there are loads of modules all doing varying degrees of the same thing with the missing bits determined largely by the name of the module.
The holy grail of all modules is the one that finally pulls together all the relevant functions into one module. There's one guy who was on the right track with a 'content builder' module, but last I enquired about it development was stalled. If that guy is around still, get in touch and I'll be only too happy to write up a list of specs if it helps get it moving again.
Publishing stuff:
- Text
- Images
- URLs
- Documents/files
- Date functions
- Authors/roles
- Categories
- Prices
- Comments
- Ratings
- Notifications/subscriptions
- Paging
- Grid displays
- Moderation
- Versioning
- Sorting
- Syndication/trackbacks etc
- and so on
Content would be created, versioned, moderated/approved in one place, but displayed and consumed everywhere. The DNN model whereby one normally creates the content in the place where it is going to be displayed is not really necessary, sometimes not right, and many CMS systems forgo this altogether.
A set of modules built according to these ideas (content creator and content displayer) would cover just about any content publication needs.. and if done right, would be the one must-have module for any DNN installation.
I already use Scott's News Articles module like this with partial success. The trick is... don't be tempted to place it on the homepage, but instead put it somewhere on a page made just for the content creator. You can add all your content to this and then use the Latest Articles module, which is really a templated rss type of module, to format and display your content elsewhere. You can create a template to make it look like news announcements on the homepage, or a template or make it look like a blog, or a repository, or a gallery, or whatever. The key point is that one drops the edit-in-place concept for edit-here but display-there.
Whoever finally builds a module with the full compliment of publishing functionality will finally have created a proper DNN CMS... and I'll be there to buy it!
Regards,
Rob
P.s. Among many issues I have with the Repository is that both the main instance and the dashboard have to share the same template set. With Ventrian's News Articles you paste the template into the module instance so it can be different each time.
The problem with the Blog is that different authors can't post to the same category. They can have categories of the same name, but they are in seperate blogs.
I've also used NukeNews, but that is missing a few tokens in the details view.. such as a thumbnail image. Nukefeeds however, is quite good for displaying articles as it has paging built in.