OK, I'm not going to re-invent the wheel, so if you want to get started creating your own DNN modules, here are the things to do to get a good understanding of what's going on. First go to Michael Washington's site. He's the guy who wrote the manual on DNN module development, and his website is the best starting point I can imagine. So:
- Read his introduction to DNN modules.
- Work through his Creating a Super-Simple DotNetNuke Module tutorial.
- Work through Matthew Hintzen's Creating a DNN Module and Understanding DNN Architectural Approach Tutorial. It explains data sources very well.
- Work through Michael Washington's Using the DotNetNuke Website Starter Kit tutorial. I'm using this all the time, it saves a lot of time and hassle.
- Take a look at the rest of Michael Washington's tutorials. Don't be put off by the fact that some of them are labelled as outdated. They are still essential to understanding the basics of module development, especially if you don't want to rely on LINQ...
After all that, you should have a pretty good idea of how to create your own module. However, at this point I got a little confused about things like module packaging, deployment, what the settings files are good for etc. The following series of articles will follow the development of a rather complex module and hopefully answer any questions that you may have.
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