XMod Pro has always been an application builder. You build a form to collect data, a view to display it, a feed to expose it. Those three things work together. They share field names, reference the same table, and depend on each other in ways that are obvious when you’re in the middle of building them and easy to forget six months later when you come back to make a change.
Version 4 didn’t reflect any of that. You had a list of forms. A list of templates (called Views in v5). A list of feeds. Three separate screens, no connection between them. If you built a product catalog application — a form to add products, a public view to browse them, an admin view to manage them, a feed to export them — those files sat in three different lists with no indication they belonged together.
Projects fix that.
A project is a container. You give it a name — a real one, not a file-system-safe one; spaces and punctuation are fine — and add whatever forms, views, and feeds belong together. That’s all there is to it structurally. The resources themselves don’t move or change. If you delete the project later, they’re still there. A project is just the relationship, not a copy.
Opening everything at once
The reason to group resources is so you can find them more easily and work on them together. In the Explorer sidebar, each project expands to show its contents broken out by type: Forms, Views, Feeds. If you just want a quick look at what’s inside without expanding, hover over the project name and a popover shows the description, a resource count by type, and when it was last modified.
Next to each project header and each type header is a double-arrow icon. Click the one on the project and every file in that project opens, each in its own tab, all at once. Click the one on the Forms header and just the forms open. Or just click individual items to open them one at a time. The tabs, the color-coding, the ability to click between them — all of that works exactly as described in the tabbed editing post. Projects are just the thing that puts the right files in front of you without hunting.
The description field
When you create a project you can add a description. In practice this ends up working like a README. You can use it to note what the project is for, which database table it writes to, what a new developer would need to know to set it up, or anything else you’d want to find when you come back to this six months from now. The search in version 5 looks inside project descriptions, not just names, so you can find a project by what it does even when you can’t remember what you called it.
Pinning
If there’s a project you’re actively working on and want fast access to, you can pin it. Pinned projects — and pinned individual resources — show up in the Pinned Items section of the dashboard, the Control Panel’s home screen. One click from there opens it directly.
Scope
Projects have a scope setting: Portal or Global. By default, a project and its resources are scoped to the current portal. Set it to Global and they’re available across all portals on the DNN installation. This mirrors how resources themselves can be scoped, and setting it at the project level is just a cleaner way to manage it.
A few other details
The More Actions menu on any project gives you Unpin, Duplicate, and Delete. Duplicate creates a new project pointing at the same resources — useful when you want to organize the same files under a different grouping without rebuilding the list from scratch. Delete removes the project and leaves every resource it contained exactly where it was.
Like other explorer tabs, in the Projects explorer, you can filter the project list by scope and sort it. Plus, a search box at the top of the Explorer’s Projects tab lets you find a project by name without scrolling.
Projects are in the public beta now. If you’re a current XMod Pro customer, grab it from the Downloads section and try it on a test site. The announcement post has the requirements, the 90-day expiry, and how to report what you find.
Discuss the Beta