My latest offering to the DotNetNuke Forge (open source modules and more for the DotNetNuke framework and hosted on www.codeplex.com/contentdejour) stems from a request from a potential client for a Text/HTML module which would display a different devotional for each day of the year. Although I could find many content rotators on Snowcovered and in the DotNetNuke MarketPlace and a few, I found none that would quite fit the client's requirements. Most were orientated toward serving up content that would change every few seconds or minutes or on each visit to a site. So, I decided to create my own.
Some of the features of the module (which requires DNN framework version 04.07.00 or later) include:
Content to be displayed may be selected based on any one of the following:
- Month - i.e. January, February, . . December
- Day of Month - i.e. 1 through 31
- Day of Year - i.e. 1 through 365
- Month and Day of Month - i.e. January 1-31, February 1-29, March 1-31 . . . December 1-31
- Day of Week - i.e. Sunday, Monday, . . . Saturday
- Month and Day of Week - i.e. January Sun-Sat, February Sun-Sat . . .
- Random
Should more than one item of content be available for one of the above periods, selection may further be made by the following:
- Random
- First Available (based on default Month, Day, Day of Week sort)
- Last Available
- Sequential (based on cookie set upon each visit to the page)
- Least Viewed (based on cookie set upon each visit to the page)
- Start and End Timespan (i.e. 8 a.m. to noon, noon to 3 p.m., 3 p.m. to midnight, etc.)
To facilitate easy change of daily content for holidays or type of content, each tab module instance can further specify a user definable category as a further criteria.
A few of the supported features include:
- Token Replacement in both the rich text content and the Title field
- Module Title Replacement - module title may optionally be replaced by the Title field of an item of content
- Module Hiding when there is no content that matches the display criteria for a particular day
- Content items may be individually disabled to prevent showing temporarily
- Content items may be selected for editing either when displayed or from a grid which may be filtered by any of the daily selection/category criteria.
- Grid of available content items utilizes novel multi-column sort (ascending/descending/not-sorted) and indication of sorting priority.
- Categories may be added/edited by the administrator and their view order arranged in the category editor control
- ISearchable and IPortable are implemented.
- Module is dynamically-compiled (WSP model) for ease of future modification and enhancement.
The below demonstration shows only one of the many ways the module can be used - in this case to display different content for each of the seven days of a week.
To download the latest release version (which includes full VB source code) , please visit www.codeplex.com/contentdejour.
Although this free offering is not officially supported, I will try to respond to bug reports, questions, and suggestions for enhancement posted to the Content Dejour forum on this website or the discussion board on the CodePlex project page.