I was wondering if anyone had found anyway to add site wide categories that link to pages/tabs?  I see many modules with their own category lists but can't seem to find any module/info regarding how to setup something like "one category list to rule them all".  This is such a basic function in eCommerce packages that I didn't even think to put it on my CMS review checklist so this might be a DNN deal breaker for me.

Hello,

Check out Ventrian News Articles Module. It's in use on www.dotnetnukepodcast.com - you can set up summaries to link to pages + it's useful for generating RSS feeds.

www.ventrian.com

we did a review of it here

It's been updated with further features since the review, but it should give you an idea of how it works.

It may also be worth having a look on www.snowcovered.com for category modules / link clouds etc.

Thank you for the recommendation.  I'm actually trialling DNNArticle because 1. They have a trial for use on localhost only, and 2. They have multiple modules that appear to have some flexibility.  I'm going to try putting all content into the Article module and then displaying the article categories in a right/left pane. 

This quest for site wide advanced search (by date and category etc) and category management seems to have exposed a big structural flaw in DNN.  Since every module, usually, has it's own data table(s) there's really no core content.  What I'd expected was some type of content table with core fields for tabID, module ID, title, content, description, active, date ranges which w/b linked to categories and roles.  At the data level, a blog is same as article as Text/HTML, etc.