Building a Module for sitefinity (part 2) : The concept

Building a Module for sitefinity (part 2) : The concept

Posted on March 06, 2007 0 Comments

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Module is integrated in Sitefinity modules section as an assembly. This means that in order to create your own module you need to create a new C# project (Class library). The core class in this module you will name any way that you find suitable (for example : ListModule, MyModule…), but the important thing here is that this class needs to inherit Telerik.WebModule class.

In order to appear on the modules page and be usable, module needs to be registered in the web.config file.

The resulting .dll file you will obviously put in the bin folder of your website.

The module itself has two fundamental sides : administrative and public. The administrative side is the one you see in the modules part of Sitefinity, while the public side consists of the controls that users can drag onto the page in order to take advantage of your module. Take a look at the image below to get a better understanding of this distinction.Administrative and Public side of a module

In this post, I will concentrate mostly on the Administrative side of the module. The public part will be dealt with in one of the coming posts. The administrative side of the module furthermore can be divided into two more sections. The Command Panel and Control Panel. To understand this separation better, you can think of the command panel as the “left side” and control panel as the “right side” of the screen. In essence, Command Panel (left side) is there really just to facilitate the Control panel (right panel) with some kind of sub navigation. Take a look at this image to get a clearer picture.

Administrative side of the module

So the idea here is that you use the core class of a module (the one that inherits from a WebModule class) as some kind of container to hold the two other controls you will create : the CommandPanel and ControlPanel controls. What will those two classes do is completely up to you and depends on what your module is supposed to do.

Here you can download a template project to get you up to speed. [Need to create this project and post a link for download]

In the next post we’ll dig deeper into the code and create the two basic controls, namely CommandPanel and ControlPanel controls.

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