I posted this question about a week ago on the dotnetnuke forum and someone was nice enough to reply that I might have been using the wrong search terms.

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I have a somewhat complex question that I find easiest to pose using a scenario.

If I am designing a site in dotnetnuke for a company that sells nails and our company has a changing list of lengths, materials, thickness, etc of the nails we offer, does dotnetnuke have a way for me to repurpose this content across multiple pages, newsletters, etc.?  I would like to know if there is a way that I can create a dynamic link for this granular content where I can update instances of this information across the site by changing this content in one location.

 I've been discussing DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) with some of my colleages and it has come to my attention that we have an unquestionable need for the concept I mentioned with the nails that I only know to call "content repurposing".  I have tried numerous searches for this term and dotnetnuke and they haven't given me much to work with as yet and I was wondering if some modules exist for this kind of need and/or if there are some alternate terms I can use that are more related to the dotnetnuke lingo.

Anyone?
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I have since done a search and found that content sharing seems a bit limited in dotnetnuke.  Is this true?  Can anyone tell me what modules might be best suited for a similar scenario as listed above?

Thank you for your time.

Hello,

If you are wanting to update an entire site covering products, articles, newsletters etc. with varying content i think you will have to programme your own modules to get this functionality.

If you are selling products, you could check out  Catalook - they allow you to download a trial of the module. This may allow you to setup some of what you need, but I doubt it will give you the full functionality.

From the example you have given you will probably need to create multiple modules to interact together.

Thanks,

Thank you very much for responding and I appreciate the tip on the module. I'm curious what you think of the following:

I have some co-workers that have worked with the FCKeditor in the past and they tell me they are capable of modifying this module (e.g. adding a dynamic drop-down list). I was wondering if it might be possible to use the equivalent of a server side include in this text that could be used for specific blocks of information that could be added through another dialog. I'm not as concerned about the ease of use in creating the lists (that won't be done often), I'm more concerned about how easy it would be to instantiate the list inside a text/html module.

In your opinion, do you think implementing this feature would be limited to the modification of the rendering and editing functionality of the FCKEditor module or do you think this project would have a scope outside of that module?

Thank you very much for your first response.

If I was going to include lists that various modules are going to use I would make use of the Host / List menu and create lists within that.

If all of your modules take their info from these lists (including your FCK Editor adaption), it will be easy to update.

On another note - a module way back in DNN V2 called magic gadget was a Text / HTML module which allowed you to add tokens (just as you do when skinning) and when displayed live these tokens would display various pieces of data, such as username etc. So that could also be another possibility.

Excecellent, I'll look into all of this. Thank you so much for giving me a starting point! If I have any luck with this I will let you know.