Josh McWilliam

(Originally posted to my DotNetNuke.com Blog) Hello everyone. I just wanted to introduce myself in this first Blog entry and say that I am very excited to begin contributing to DNN as the new News Module Team Lead. We are in the planning phases right now, but here is a sneak peak at some of the high level ideas we are talking about adding in the next phase of this project.

• Display
  • Show one or more news feeds displayed as a single, merged feed
  • Ability to define how often an individual feed is updated
  • Ability to activate / de-activate an individual feed
  • Ability to customize how the news feed data is displayed on the screen per individual news feed
    • XSLT templating
    • HTML / Token templating
    • Pre-defined default templates to select from
  • Ability to determine sort order
    • Feed Name
    • Feed Title
    • Published Date
  • Ability to enable / disable HTML escaping in feed description
• Publish
  • Ability to show list of feeds that are available for syndication.
  • Ability to enable / disable an aggregate of feeds to be re-syndicated.
• Caching
  • Ability to cache feeds at the host level.
  • Ability for an individual display instance of the news feeds to determine the update frequency.
  • Ability to cache aggregated feeds for re-syndication via files to prevent load on database
• Security
  • Ability to request secured news feeds
  • Ability to syndicate news feeds securely
  • Ability to encrypt / decrypt usernames and passwords in requests.

Please note that these are currently IDEAS, NOT GARAUNTEED REQUIREMENTS at this point. Please do comment though as we would like your feedback on how we can best improve this module. Ideas and comments would probably be best added to the project forum, as a forum lends itself better to discussion.

(Originally posted to my DotNetNuke.com Blog) I am putting out a new call for developers for the News project. Anyone interested in helping out should email me at jmcwilliam@flatburger.com. Any information you could provide about yourself would be very helpful. Specifically, noting things like your experience, how much time you can contribute to the project, and what you would like to do to help would be useful. I am attempting to structure the project into several small pieces that can be developed separately. As a result of this, I hope to allow people to help without having to commit to a large amount of time. Developers are not the only people we need. Anyone interested in helping with any of the following should please contact me. Here are some additional ways that people may be able to help:

• Research – people to figure out comparative / competitive products and document their functionality to help figure out what functionality to implement next.
• Analysis – Functionality, UI / UX and Technical Analysis are all important aspects of the project.
• Development – Development will be broken into small pieces to allow many to contribute.
• Localization – I plan to come up with localization files in English for this module early in the development process and try to seek help from people to localize these files into other languages.
• Documentation – Help, FAQs, Tutorials, etc. – all important aspects of a project.
• QA – Need help testing the module. Beta testers, regression testers, the more testing the better.
• Support – People willing to commit to monitoring support forums and/or providing additional support for modules during certain times.
• Marketing – People charged with the task of using guerilla marketing techniques to spread the word about this module. Selling this functionality of this module in competing spaces can help to sell people on DNN as a whole.

Every product should have its own team focusing on furthering development of all aspects of the product. In order for this to work, we need volunteers, so please, volunteer. No contribution is too little.