In this Southern Fried DNN User Group Meeting:

Speaker: Timo Breumelhof
Topic: Open Content Use Cases
40FINGERS bases a lot of their client websites on Open Content. Timo will show some interesting use cases to demonstrate ways you can (mis)use Open Content. He'll show how they moved a client (with 16,000 articles) from Ventrian News Articles to Open Content and what he created to generate markdown and an example Skin for the DNN Theme Objects.

Speaker: Jay Mathis
Topic: Structured Content In DNN

DNN BUZZ - Meeting Links and topics this month:

• We started the meeting with a few "thank yous" to our Sponsor Managed.com for being awesome hosting provider for southernfrieddnn.com
  www.Managed.com DNN Focused Hosting & Hosting Support
• We then talked a little about the history of the Southern Fried DNN User Group
  Our website southernfrieddnn.com
  SouthernFried Youtube
  SouthernFried on Twitter
  SouthernFried on Facebook SouthernFried on MeetUP OpeHelp.Slack.com
• Convincing Developers to use Structured Content
  Starting out as a conversation within the Slack OpenHelp DNN slack workspace, David described that it was GREAT content to make permenant by posting and repuprposing as a Blog post within the DNNCommunity.org site. So Aaron Lopez took what was an excellent response on this content and turned it into a Blog post. (It's also relevant for today's meeting so a great extra mention for today!)
• DNN Version releases - DNN 9.10.1 is out however we may see a 9.10.2 coming in the next week
• DNN Summit 2022 - The Request for Speakers is now closed and those speakers and contributors are being evaluated and worked into the convention schedule. Till it's announced, it's a good time to sign up for the event and to start thinking about travel to Las Vegas if you are up for in-person conventions! If not, no worries, join us online virtually in 2022!

--

 

Open Content Use Cases - Timo Breumelhof

40FINGERS bases a lot of their client websites on Open Content. Timo will show some interesting use cases to demonstrate ways you can (mis)use Open Content. He'll show how they moved a client (with 16,000 articles) from Ventrian News Articles to Open Content and what he created to generate markdown and an example Skin for the DNN Theme Objects.

Timo is a board memember on the DNNConnect organization and is with long-time DNN focused organization 40Fingers. Timo joins us today from the Netherlands, he's been working within DNN since 2006 and DNN version 3.3.1. He started an Association (company) within the Netherlands with three other partners (hence 40 fingers!).

• Open Content can be downloaded from GitHub
  https://github.com/sachatrauwaen/OpenContent - it has been around since 2015 and is currently at version 4.6
• Open Content is a module developed in a similar way to other rapid development DNN modules such as XMod Pro and then later newer systems such as 2SXC. There are some specific features within Open Content that are special such as their focus on multi-language support, template actions which can be included within skins and more.
• Timo began by sharing with us a few different reference sites for information and resources.
• https://opencontent.readme.io/ - a great place to start to learn more about OpenContent and how to work within it.
• https://demo.40fingers.net/ - Timo shares many module and opencontent elments on their demo location
• https://www.opencontentsolutions.net predefined solutions which are ready for download and use for further teaching and training
• Timo described several features that 40Fingers has helped pay for development and release within Open Content and several new solutions that they've created because of it such as Comments within the system, 404 redirect actions, and showed the News Article system that they've created as a solution for a client with more than 16K records which needed translation into a new format!

--

 

Structured Content In DNN - Jay Mathis

Jay is on the Awareness Group, the Developer Group and has been dedicated to working within DNN for a long time... he started working with Structured Content years ago and though he was working in the beginning with systems such as 2SXC and other ones that were out there, but he wanted to build his own new structured content solution... something that if he could handle the main 80% of use cases that he'd be happy with what was built.

He's built the new Structured Content Module and walked through some setup examples for main items such as starting from scratch to set up new tables and templates.

• Jay's hope is to work on this to prepare to a state of use and then ultimately contribute it to the DNNCommunity for release with the core or as a core module. This is not released yet and is at a stage of Proof of Concept currently, but when released, will be in this location
• https://github.com/DNNCommunity/Dnn.StructuredContent
• He began by showing a data management interface which lets users create database tables with fields, setting datatypes and table relationships with some drag-&-drop clean interface. The focus was that this is a data-arcitecture FIRST plan... normalized database tables with proper tables, records and relationships. Though the data is API/JSON driven for display, the underlying strucgtrues is not EAV or "blob" data approach, this is discrete database tables.
• One interesting approach which is different from other rapid development modules such as XMP and 2SXC is that the data for this is all API driven. When a table is created, it creates a DNN-based Web API which can be consumed by the Structured Content module, but can be consumed by anything else as well. SoFri Attendee Billy Shelton summed it up well by remarking in the chat that, "...in the amount of time I can create the data structure in the UI, I have also created a full CRUD API. Very nice."
• From that point, the module works like Liquid Content and has the next step of creating a Visualizer which is a template for display within DNN. Currently the Liquid templateing system or language is built in, but plans could later includ Razor or other template types.
• After this session, a flood of support came in for Jay and the efforts to date. Be sure to check out the video for full details and the project on Github!

--

Watch the Southern Fried DNN User Group September 2021 Meeting: