Well, I'm feeling dumb here. For the life of me, I can't figure out how to get "Latest 10 Forum Posts" or "Latest 10 Blog Entries" to appear in modules on the home page. Are these RSS feeds and where do you find the syndication link for them if so? DNNCreative actually has a whole bunch of these "Latest" lists - I'd love to know how they are created and how they can be customized.

Anyone?

Are you using Active Forums? With active Forums it's a seperate module just above the main forum module in the Add Module drop down.

I'm not. Just a 4.5.3 standard installation with no other addons.

Further research tells me that maybe it's the "Report" module with some tSQL, but now I'm at a loss to find the database field definitions.

Ugh...DNN is not for the timid, eh?

I think that the latest 10 forum posts probably is using the Top Posts module that's part of active forums.

As for the others, we should probably let Lee tell us, but the notion that the Reports module is involved could be a well-researched guess.

As for DNN being "not for the timid" I think that's not quite right. I think that setting up and running a website isn't necessarily for the timid either. Especially when you get to the point of having a big, interactive site with lots of content and automatically generated pages. IMHO, DNN is possibly a lot easier to "master" than, say, learning to create web sites in PHP and connect it to a mySQL server ...

Even getting DotNetNuke installed and running isn't always easy. But, once you do get it installed there's a lot of horsepower under the hood. You can get quite a bit done with the basic DotNetNuke setup and the modules that are part of the system. You don't have to use ActiveModules for forums. The "stock" Forums module is fairly good. As is the Blog, Repository, etc.

Like most things, when you want to do more, or you want to do something special, you'll have to invest at least in learning some. Creating a nice new skin for a DotNetNuke site is quite easy ... in principle ... but can become comples when you want a custom skin ...

Now, as for the Reports module, it's basically a tool for creating reports from and SQL data table. Assuming the information is there: news articles, forum posts, etc., you can pull out the data, find the most recent 10 entries, etc. and format it nicely.

Hello,

The top 10 posts from the forum is a module that is part of active forums.

The other 'top 10s' are created using the news articles module: www.ventrian.com

Basically the site is set up like this:

Tutorial pages - standard text / html modules - areas for subscribers and non-subscriber

Listings of tutorials with short descriptions - news / articles modules - this creates the sites RSS feeds. Ideally I would have placed all content within this module, but you can't have separate areas for subscribers / non-subscribers.

The News Articles module comes with a latest articles modules and you can select how many articles to display along with which category, so this is what is displayed on the home page, they are the latest articles rather than the most popular.

Hope this helps - much easier than delving into SQL queries and the reports module ;-)

Thanks,

> much easier than delving into SQL queries and the reports module ;-)

Very true!

Great, thanks so much guys, that answers the question. Now it also creates a series of other questions, so I'll start a new thread on this in the forum.