Dear All,

today i just want to add my two pence to this discussion. It should be from the users and programmers point of view.

Started with DNN 1 year ago, today i got a lot of expierences of the pros and cons.
i am currently using it on 10 portals and one community portal.
i purchased a lot of Moduls. mainly from smart-think, ventrian and dnnfusion, activemoduls to have a community, like it is existing on millions of websites.
Rods moduls currently give the main parts, like profile, group, events, birthday. Unfortunetly the homepage modul left. But was the right decision from my point of view.
So waht is everbody doing if he wants to have beside the smart-thinker fucntionality? He buys moduls fromlet me say dnnfusion, which gives a user homepage (titled profil).

So and now there is the major pain. dnn and even ventrian are implementing there own profil modul. You don`t need to use it, but if you want to build up the community, than you have to.
Means a user at my side, has to input there birthday a minimum 2 times and upload their photo three times, so it exist in all part of HIS community.

From the programmer point of view, i ask myself, why are all reinventing the wheel and not sit together at a table and see the ressources and try to develop interfaces between the moduls from different vendor. You know at all, you have your specialization. Dnnfusion has a good Homepage modul, Scot is doing more news and gallery things, and rod of course is doing the whole - let me say listing things.

So for us users it is a pain in the a**, to modify the ascx files, transfer toklens through the querystring or even customize the source - with recompiling everytime there is a update.

Today the only possiblibility is to pass the userid between them, but that doesn'T help, to switch of redunadant data typing of the user. Its not really frindly to ask him again and agin...what was your birthday, a what was it again :-)

Don't get me wrong, all the work is good and you are all giving best support, but it is a matter of let the community grow and make life easier for users...

curerntly i am strting the development. Maybe my first project should be a modul, whihc is responsile for sharing informations between the modules of all vendors :-) (Normally a thing the core should do)

Best regards

Marc

Chuck Rizzio wrote - Pictures (Photo Gallery) Chuck R.

Out of interest, I have integrated Ultra Media Gallery 5 with the Smart-Thinker UserProfile module on PokerDIY. The UMG UserGuide actually uses the Smart-Thinker UserProfile module as an example of how to show the pics for a certain user, and it's very easy to set up.

This is the main poker gallery, which anyone can submit pics to (with an approval phase on PokerDIY). If you look at a particular user's profile you will see just the pics that they have submitted to the Gallery. I really like the UMG module and the developer offers great support (please note that I am not getting paid to say this (unless you buy it through the Snow link above)  ;) It's good to see high quality DNN modules and I recommend this product as the preferred gallery solution for integration with the Smart-Thinker Product Suite.

This would be a great addition, but it is not currently possible. Hopefully at some point the core blog module would allow this (in the same way you can drop Ultra Media Gallery on to profile pages) but the blog module would need to be restuctured to allow this...

OMG! I am not alone! I thought I didn't confrigue the module correctly. Here is what I get

You can almost do that to every useprofile module. Insert all the modules on two pages. Home page and user profile page. Home page is user default page. All modules on the home page should be set up to show logged on user and all the modules on the user profile page should be set up to passed in user id. Also members should not have direct access to the user profile page. Wow, this is my 2 nd day into this. I really hope Rodeny can come up with good forum/ mygallery/ mymedia/edit profile intergration. I am willing to chip in if someone else is also interested!

There is no need for the useprofile friends request module to be on the user profile page. It can be on my page with the inbox, if you are using ventrian pvt message. Also, I am noticing that ST referrals and friend request cannot be one page! I hope Rodeny fixes it because I am planning to have the referrals on my page, gonna use the aggregator from dnnstuff. I am not using it right now but hope it works with the aggregator.