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May is a month of “Festivals” the world over! From the Strawberry St. Festival in Richmond, VA to Sposalizio dell’ Albero (the Wedding of the Trees) in Vetralla, Italy people find reason to celebrate this glorious month.  And at DotNetNuke we believe we have reason to celebrate too!

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This is a serious release of Events, completely in line with the DNN6 UX/UI guidelines and ready for Windows Azure.
A special thanks from me goes to Roger Selwyn, colleague team member of Events, who did splendid development work for this release of Events.
 

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Every week it seems more and more people are asking me how they can run DotNetNuke on Windows Azure. Last year David Rodriguez released the DotNetNuke Azure Accelerator which aims to simplify the process of installing DotNetNuke on Windows Azure. It was a great alternative to manually deploying DotNetNuke but it required the user to know how to use the Windows Azure Management Portal for setting up their Azure account. The original version of the accelerator also included the DotNetNuke installation package within the download. This meant that the accelerator was closely tied to the DotNetNuke version and had to be updated with every DotNetNuke release.

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So I have been a smartphone user for a few years now, and it continues to astound me how much I rely on my device on a daily basis. People who know me well will tell you I am generally not an early adopter of technology, so it took me longer than most of my technophile contemporaries before I jumped on the bandwagon. And the real tipping point for me was when I realized that I could replace a number of single-purpose devices with an “all-in-one” solution.

In a practical way I could get rid of my cell phone, my MP3 music player, a GPS, an antiquated voice recorder, and a low resolution point-and-shoot digital camera in favor of a single smart phone. And sure, some of those devices had a few more bells and whistles than what was available on the smartphone, but those were typically features which I did not use or care about. And even better, most smartphones were designed with extensibility in mind… which means that I could easily enhance my smartphone with additional capabilities that matter to me, over and above what comes installed on the device.

In thinking some more about this topic, I realized that the convenience of  “all-in-one” solutions have always appealed to me...

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Last week Website Magazine published their June issue which contained a list of the Top 50 Content Management Solutions available in the market. The list included both open source as well as proprietary content management systems and the ranking was based on a custom formula of website popularity based on average daily unique visitors and page views.

Aside from the list itself, Website Magazine also tried to explain in layman’s terms the definition of a content management system and how they add value to a business. The high level description of a “system that helps digital Web workers manage content in whatever form or type it is available” was fairly good, but the elaboration of “Content management systems act as the skeleton for a Web presence, providing a framework — if you will — for the future growth of a company’s digital assets” was even better, in my opinion. And in terms of evaluating CMS systems, I really liked the statement that “The best content management system is the one that provides features that match the demands and growth projections of your enterprise”.

DotNetNuke made the list at the #13 position, behind a number of very successful enterprise software systems and widely deployed open source projects.

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The module Form and List will have a new release very soon. Currently a Release Candidate is available for you for final testing. 

What is Form and List?

The last release of Form and List happened more than 2 years ago, and, as the former core modules are no longer part of the distribution, it is time to introduce the module again. 

Form and List evolved from a simple list module, called User Defined Table. A list is basically a table, where all columns share the same data type: simple strings, numbers, html, or complex types for calculations and file treatments. Each type has its own capabilities and settings. Usually a list is small and consists only out of a smaller set of items. It is designed for few hundreds, but certainly not for millions of items in mind.

A list can be rendered as a simple table, or it can be mapped to totally different kinds of layouts with the help of XSL-transformations. Don't be afraid of XSL, a token based editor helps you for the first steps.

The item editor can be set as the primary view which allows simple forms. Notifications can be send for insert, update and delete actions. In short, Form and List allows you to create simple apps, and I have seen amazing implementations in the past.

Certainly it is not a tool for everything. There are other nice modules available for free in the extension forge, e.g. the very handy helferlein form, and there are plenty of powerful modules available in the dotnetnuke store though.

Whats new in 6.0?

Form and List 6.0 should feel comfortable in DotNetNuke 6, most changes happened with the new capabilities in mind:

• The module source has been converted to C#, credits to Ernst Peter Tamminga for helping here. Also the project uses now build scripts to create new packages.
• The module design follows now the DotNetNuke 6 form patterns and ux guidelines for edit form and basic table rendering. This does not only ensure a familiar user experience, it also helped to address former issues with WAI compliance. It uses Telerik controls for date and time entries and it uses the DotNetNuke Icon API whenever possible.
  
• All (new and edited) time values supports now DST (Daylight Saving Time)
• The database scripts are now compatible to SQL Azure
• The settings, especially the Form and List configuration received a major overhaul. Tabs and sections and some JQuery-tweaks should facilitate all administration jobs.
  For example, you can now change the order of fields by drag'n'drop:
  
• Fixed some bugs and added some requested enhancements from the issue tracker.

 

Test the Release Candidate

As said before, a Release Candidate is available for testing. I am expecting it feature complete and stable, as 3 CTP release already occurred. However, any serious issue will be fixed before a final release.

There are a few changes which might break existing current layouts. All old attempts of form layouts have been removed, only the new DotNetNuke 6 form patterns remains. A future release might introduce a form editor, but I will certainly not support the old approach anymore.

That said, I am sure most of you will appreciate the new version. Please report any issue directly to the issue tracker.

If you have any questions, please ask them in forum or use the community exchange and tag your questions with "FnL6".

I would like to thank everybody who participated in the past CTPs and helped to make the module solid.

More ...

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