There’s a great feature in DotNetNuke that I have seen rarely used and extended by the community – the DotNetNuke Dashboard.
The Dashboard is an extensible view for Super User accounts which is designed to both give a summary of a particular aspect of the site, but also to allow users to send an Xml summary file of their installation for support reasons. Instead of trying to get someone on the other end of a phone to find their DotNetNuke settings and configuration, you can just request them to send you their Dashboard Xml.
I decided to have a go at working in this space by creating a new Dashboard Control, which will report on some Social Statistics for DotNetNuke sites. And it turns out that it’s probably one of the easiest extensions to write for DotNetNuke. Simple, fast and useful – I’ll take that!
Rather than go rambling into one of my long detailed blog posts, I’ve decided to keep this very short and sweet.
Here’s what I want you to do (if you have DotNetNuke 6.2 or later installation)
1) Download the install package from either the DotNetNuke Forge [DotNetNuke Social Dashboard] or from the Codeplex project [DotNetNuke Social Dashboard on Codeplex]
(Yes, Forge projects are free and open source if you didn’t know)
2) Install the package through the Host->Extensions page on your install.
3) Go to your Host->Dashboard page, and click on the ‘Social’ tab.
4) Boom! Social Stats !
5) Not enough friends on your site? Go make some!
That’s it! Enjoy!
(I’ll probably write another blog post on how to write your own dashboard. It’s very simple, and modules should really start shipping with them.)