Overview

Welcome to a new way to create custom content for your DotNetNuke website. XMod gives you the power to quickly create pages customized to the content needs of your site. Best of all, no programming is required.

(And, if you like XMod, you'll love XMod Calendar - our first add-on for XMod which combines XMod's flexibility with the organizational power of calendar displays. Visit http://dnndev.com for more information.)

XMod can be hard to sum-up in briefly. It's best to think of it as a tool you can use for creating custom solutions for your website. It gives you a lot of functionality "for free" and by default. You can create professional solutions, literally within minutes but if you're more adventurous, you can take control over virtually every aspect of your application. By using XMod you can create many different types of solutions. Here's a brief list to give you an idea of some of the things you can build with XMod:

• Product Catalogs

• Photo Album/Image Gallery

• FAQ Module

• Customer Support Request Form

• Links Module

• News Manager

• College Course Listings

• To-Do List

• Journal

• Product Reviews

• Dynamic Navigation Menu

• "Shadow" Module Replacement

• Real Estate Listings

• Customizable Feedback Form

• "What's New" Module

• DNN User Information Page

• Golf Course Listings

• Marina Listings

• Classified Ads

• ... and many more

As we like to say, XMod can't do everything, but you may never notice. XMod provides you with a lot of built-in functionality like pageable browse lists, searching, sorting, etc. In other words, XMod handles all the tedious tasks behind the scenes, allowing you to focus on what's important - your application's data and how the data is presented to the user.

All of the above solutions are made up of 1 or more of the following components:

1. Data Entry Forms: If you're creating a Gadget Reviews application, this would be the form the user fills out to submit a review. You tell XMod what should be in the form by using HTML-like tags such as <input> for a text box, <textarea> for a multi-line text box, <select> for a multi-select listbox, etc. Each control on your form can be thought of as a field in a database. You then refer to these fields in your ListView and DetailView templates (see below) to tell XMod where to place those controls' values.

2. ListView Templates: Whenever you want to display a list of Gadget Reviews for a site visitor to browse through, you create a ListView template. XMod handles most of the "plumbing" for you such as making your list pageable, searchable, and sortable. You simply tell XMod which data to display and how it should be formatted. This is done via HTML and special XMod tags.

3. DetailView Templates: Typically, your ListView template will contain the review's title and a short synopsis. When the user clicks the review's title, he is taken to the full review. This is where you use DetailView template.

NOTE: If you just need to create customizable feedback forms, support request forms, and the like, you can get by with just defining a Data Entry Form and displaying it using the FormView Module. This module can operate by itself or in conjunction with the main XMod module. This module is a bonus module and is not automatically installed as part of the main XMod PA installation. To install the FormView module, read through the installation instructions.