We have recently updated DotNest with a few general performance improvements and two new modules (that actually work even better together) adding cool features to your DotNest sites: Forum and Watcher!

The Forum module (created by Nick Mayne) filled a huge gap in the module ecosystem of Orchard, giving you the ability to create Forums for your site. The content structure is pretty straightforward: Forums at the top, which contain Threads, which contain Posts. Of course these 3 levels of content are actually driven by their individual content parts, so you can create your custom content types and configure a chain between them, just like the default one. "Post" also supports various flavors for editing (html, markdown, etc.).

The Watcher module (created by Lombiq) is a Workflows-integrated module that enables you to watch/unwatch content items. After configuring email notifications (as described in the readme), users can receive notifications when content items they are watching are changed/created (depending on the workflow configuration). The neat thing here is that this process bubbles up to a maximum of 3 levels in the content-container structure, meaning that you can configure a workflow to send a notification when a new Post was added to a Thread, even if the user is watching the parent Forum of the mentioned Thread (and not the Thread itself, for example).

Stay tuned for further updates! Here's a sneak peek:

• We'll soon a release an extensive case-study, describing the heavily customized content and permission configuration of an actual DotNest website.
• Orchard 1.8.2/1.9 was just released a few hours ago, so we'll go ahead and test it to make sure it's working great with DotNest - after that you will be able to enjoy the fixes, improvements and new features of the latest Orchard version on your DotNest sites!

No Comments