Just in April another rating was posted in the DNN Store summarizing everything we've been working on for years now: "***** This is the best module ever. You can create absolutely anything you might need. This Module should be a default on DNN, I don't understand how it isn't. I actually don't see the reason of DNN without a module like 2sxc. " And now it's much better - and still free and open source - here are the 20 most important new features we introduced:
- Visual Data-Query System to retrieve data from 2sxc, SQL or anything without writing code. This will allow web designers to create powerful Apps or create custom layout for other DNN-Modules like DNN-Events without any C# code!
- Advanced yet simple Token extensions allowing multiple repeats in a template (to visualize multiple lists) as well as showing sub-tokens like Book:Author:Name. Together with the Visual Data Query System it allows you to create extensive Apps without a single line of code.
- Import/Export of entire sites. This was inspired by Tracy Wittenkeller of T-Worx, who told me that Skin-Designers core problem is that they need to supply a full package where the customer gets a working, already-good-looking and content-pre-filled feature-rich site when they install everything. So now 2sxc can export all content-data and Apps in such a way to re-create the identical site elsewhere. This is great for site-migrations and staging-sites.
- AngularJS productivity helpers for SPAs and MAPs. We love AngularJS, and acknowledge that it's hard to get started with - especially because DNN has some requirements like HTTP-Headers which are easy to miss-implement. So we created an implementation which stays out of the way but does everything for you. If you wanted to use best-practices but failed - you'll love this!
- Single Pagers (for 1-page or long-page web sites) are an important trend not to miss - 2sxc provides new features like Section-Splitters and navigation helpers to help you create awesome HTML5 compliant single-pagers.
- No-Code Apps to customize other DNN-Modules. This is probably one of the most exciting future topics: how to create Apps without server code - and 2sxc will help you.
- Single Page Applications (SPAs) we developed various powerful concepts and demos to easily get started.
- Export/Import of data to aid migration from other CMSs and tools. Many people have old solutions using WebForms or want to migrate from Drupal, Joomla etc. - but find it hard. Thanks to this advanced feature you should be able to do amazing data migrations easily and it will also help you to mass-edit content-items.
- JSON streaming helpers (serializers) to deliver data from the Visual Query directly to JavaScript
- Much improved token-detection and abilty to add sub-property tokens like [Content:Author:LastName]
- Fallback tokens to deliver alternate content when something is missing. For example a default "no description" text or a CSS-Class when a property is not set. Example: [Content:PublicationDate||Date unknown].
- Token-Stacking - so you can place default-texts in App-Resources...
example: [Content:Author||[App:Resources:AuthorUnknown]]
...or you can define data-query parameters which check the URL first but use a default from the module -
like: "Select * From Events Where EventId = [QueryString:Id||[In:Module:DefaultEventId||[App:Settings:DefaultEventId]]]"
- Many UI Improvements to make in-page editing better and help users - especially beginners - discover powerful features
- Data Sources #1 DnnSqlDataSource which allows you to get SQL Data but only from the DNN-Database
- Data Sources #2 All SQL Data Sources now have built-in SQL-Injection protection
- DataSources #3 Forms-And-List (formerly UdT = User defined Tables) data-sources
- DataSources #4 In-DataSource so you can configure a query with data from other data sources
- Test-Parameters built into the Query-Designer, so you can use test-cases like "What if the URL had ..." for previewing your queries
- Help for users - mainly content-editors - located on 2sxc.org/help
- View-Name in URL to automatically switch between views without code or additional pages, just based on the URL
During the next few days I'll post about all these features so that you can easily leverage them.
With love from Switzerland,
Daniel with Raphael & Benjamin