What’s new in Active Cases?  Over the last few months the team has gone back and looked at our original concept work for the “shell” on Active Cases and Active Purchase.  After having time to let the concept sit with us and get feedback from Active Purchase users we decided to take it to the next level for Active Cases and the next version of the Control Panel for Active Forums.  We feel the concept is the “next level” for our module development and it was definitely a way for us to raise the bar for ourselves.  Of course these adjustments we’ve made were not purely aesthetic; we had to up our game on some of our own controls as well.

Around a year ago we implemented our own AJAX Callback control to use on our own modules to get away from the built-in ASP.Net AJAX and 3rd party controls.  The decision to do this came mainly from the fact that we felt nothing available worked as well or as efficient as the controls should.  Our first iteration of the Callback we felt was a vast improvement over anything we had used thus far, but after developing for months and using it we went back and “tightened the screws” and have a far more efficient control that we’re sure users will notice the difference with.

Now, I’ve talked so much about these two pieces, the “shell” and the Callback, because these are the keys to the success of Active Cases.  Even though the new version of Active Cases has a ton of features; without these two pieces perfected and working optimally the product would not be worth what it is.  You can find modules that list any and every feature you can think of, but that doesn’t mean the module is worth anything because of the inherent weaknesses in their architecture.  The “shell” and Callback are the keys to the success of Active Cases and are really what make it a module developed by Active Modules. 

More details about the newly designed Control Panel to come soon.