You just installed a brand new module.  As far as you know, you only installed one module.  You create a new page, go to add the new module...What?  You don't have one module, you have 2, 3, 4 or 20 modules from just installing that one new module.  You only installed one module, but now you have "Vendor X - Module A", "Vendor X - Module B", "Vendor X - Module C", etc.  Now you are stuck trying to decide which of the multiple entries that now appear in the list to add first.  Make sure you guess the correct one or maybe you should just add all of them? That probably didn't work, now you have to add them to separate pages and then try to link each one through settings. Chances are you have been through this before and know exactly what I'm talking about.

Think about a suite of social networking modules.  You have so many different features it makes perfect sense to build each feature as a separate module, right?  Possibly, but not very user friendly or intuitive.  How about just building one module that contains all the features on one page?  Not very flexible or search engine friendly. 

When we started building Active Social we only wanted one module for all the features, but we also wanted flexibility while keeping search engine optimization in mind.  We also wanted to make it possible for you to use some of the views as part of your skin.  Meaning, you can build the view into your skin without having to add the module to each page.

All of modules consist of three main controls. 
1) Main.ascx or ModuleName.ascx - this is used for the View control. 
2) ControlPanel.ascx - this is used for the Edit or Admin control. 
3) Settings.ascx - this is used in some cases for basic module settings.

Main.ascx and ControlPanel.ascx usually only consist of a placeholder control where we will dynamically load other controls or views in code behind based upon parameters.  Typically these parameters are based upon query strings or other form data.  We took this one step further with Active Social

Active Social is one module with multiple views.  This will allow you to create a site structure as simple or complicated as you like.  You can have Active Social on a single page or break it up by feature into multiple pages.  You can also have multiple modules on the same page with different templates and themes defined by roles.  Obviously that can get complicated, but that gives you an idea of the kind of flexibility we have built into the module.