With the release of DotNetNuke 6.2, we saw a tremendous push in communication focused on the social modules; what these modules do, how they work, how to integrate with them… At Aricie, we are very interested in the new modules and functionalities because they will change what offers we can make to our clients but also because our own modules will have to take into account these new tools. So let’s take a quick tour of what DotNetNuke 6.2 offers and how our url rewriting module Friendlier Url Provider (FUP) can help manage these new social modules as quickly as possible.

  New social modules DotNetNuke 6.2

Among the social modules, the one most prominent is the Activity Feed, a module that displays a stream of all operations from a user or a user group.  

  Not only the user can directly post messages in his activity feed, but other modules installed on the site can also integrate with the feed. For example a blog post or a forum post will appear in the activity feed of the user posting them, on in the activity feed of the concerned group. So this module will be handling urls to other modules and pages on the website.

With this module, DotNetNuke allows site owners to easily create communities by giving them a source for common interests; whether for group work or for aggregating users around specific subjects, the Activity Feed is shaping up to be the main module for a DotNetNuke website leveraging the social modules.  

Alongside the Activity Feed, DotNetNuke offers a Message Center that merges two functionalities; managing the exchanges between users and managing notifications.  

  The users will be able to communicate directly via discussion threads managed by DotNetNuke. Unlike the Activity Feed whose entries can be configured with various visibility levels, messages are visible by their recipients only.

Another important part of the Message Center is its ability to manage Notifications. Third-party modules can now call out to a user with information that may concern them; just as the Blog module can automatically post a message in the Activity Feed when a new entry is published, it can also notify an admin that an article is waiting for validation.  

Social groups are managed by a module that is based on the Role concept of DotNetNuke; a group is just a role that is assigned to users  by their subscribing to it.  

  Finally, the User Relationship allows each user to manage its friends and the people of interest he is following.  

  Social modules and FUP

When looking at these modules, one can see that the most important module from the perspective of handling and rewriting urls is the Activity Feed module. It is the heart of event publishing via the urls posted form third party modules. Let’s see how Friendlier Url Provider (FUP) is able to handle right now the urls managed by the Activity Feed. FUP works as a brick construction set. Providers declare that they handle some rewriting groups based on parameters presented in the url. These providers can then be linked to various scenariis and execute their rewriting task in each different situation.  

  For example, a provider able to transform and rewrite the parameter user identifier (userid) in a url as the user login can be then used for the Blog module and the Forum module. In both case the url rewriting will occur according to the same rules but one can imagine a different configuration; for the blog the author login may be used at a high level in the url whereas in the forum the information may be the thread title…

This architecture means that FUP can already rewrite the urls in the Activity Feed from DotNetNuke 6.2. The administrator only need to configure FUP to load providers for the modules that will need to be rewritten in the Activity Feed and their urls will be managed by FUP.  

  Using this behavior, FUP gives you the ability to managed directly the social modules of DotNetNuke 6.2 with the providers that already exist, and you can write what providers are not yet implemented with our simple API.  

Limits

DotNetNuke 6.2 uses a interface management framework named KnockoutJs in its modules; Knockoutjs lets the developer handle the user interface from the user client browser. As a result, some modules have their urls management taken under the browser responsibility; most notably the message center uses KnockoutJs intensively to manage what view is currently displayed. These urls are not going through the DotNetNuke normal url rewriting pipeline and can’t be rewritten by FUP at the moment.  

Similarly, during our tests on the RC version of DotNetNuke 6.2 we hit some problems; some urls weren’t passed to the rewriting pipeline. Other urls weren’t meant to be rewritten because of their use for KnockoutJs. Not every bug was ironed out and some prevented the user from managing the tasks they set out to accomplish.  

  Afterwards

In any case, the release of DotnetNuke 6.2 with its new functionalities bear good news. First DotNetNuke is still improving in a direction where we’re impatient to see it grow; even though some modules will have to be refined according to user feedback (in particular the activity feed doesn’t grant a fine enough control of the visibility for its entries) they nonetheless allow putting down the basis for social integration in our websites. Second, we’ve seen by following the release of DNN 6.2 that our modules are able to adapt to future evolutions as quickly as they’re put out, a huge advantage to benefit from future steps in the DotNetNuke roadmap.  

Let’s wrap up this tour of the social modules in DNN 6.2 and how FUP can play along with them. In the next post I’ll explain how to write custom providers with the SimpleAPI.