After installing the latest 5.1.0 beta of DotNetNuke that was released this week, I noticed a new icon and a couple of links in the Control Panel when I logged in as the host of the new install.
As always in my endeavors with this platform my curiosity got the best of me and I had to see where these two links took me. I assumed that it would be to something that only an admin or host would need access to. I was pleasantly surprised to see the result on clicking on the admin link.
It brought me to a page in my new DNN install that had a link to each of the pages under my admin menu. As well as when I placed my mouse over any of the items in the Admin Console, a tooltip is displayed telling me about the link and what I can find by following it.
Also on the console there are two drop down boxes one is to select the size of the icons for use on the page. As well as another one to choose whether to display the contents of the page in simple view or detailed view. Detailed view basically takes the tooltip contents and places it on the page instead of the popup window.
I also noticed that this console module was placed on the Admin page of the menu and the host console was placed on the Host page of the menu. In previous versions of DNN these two menu choices were not enabled so we couldn’t navigate to them in the menu structure. I think this will be a great tool for new administrators and people unfamiliar with how DNN works.
But there are more goodies in this module. I also checked to see if this module had any settings that could be adjusted. I found that there are a number of different settings in the module settings.
The settings of the module are as follows:
- Show children of: allows us to set this module on any page and then show the children of a different page then the one we are currently on. If no page is selected then it shows the children pages of the current page the module resides on.
- Default icon size: this can be set to 16px or 32px for displaying the icons in the module.
- Allow icon resize: if this checkbox is checked then the user can select the size of the icons they want to use in the module themselves in the drop down box.
- Default view: this can be set to simple or detailed view for displaying the items in the console module.
- Allow view change: if this checkbox is checked then the user can select the type of view that they want to see in the module themselves.
- Show tooltip: checking this checkbox determines whether or not we will see the jQuery tooltip when we hover over a choice in the module.
If a user makes changes to the console module as to how they want to view that page such as large icons or detailed view, these changes get saved and the next time the user comes back they will be presented with the same view that they previously had. This is a nice feature and allows each user to customize how they want to interact with the module. Also the module checks permissions to determine what pages a user has access to.
After looking at the module and the code that it generates, it is nice to see that they code outputs xhtml and doesn’t make use of tables anywhere in the output. So it provides a good example of how modules should be written to take care of the over exuberant use of html tables in module development.
I have some uses that I can picture for the use of this module going forward in the future in some of my development. Most of which would be a similar use as to how the core framework uses it, but would be incorporated into my modules.
Guess I’ll go back to exploring this new release see if I can find some more new features to let everyone in on.