I'm looking for a way where I can create a link between a specific forum/forum group and other parts of DotNetNuke. Both in part of showing related posts in the forums, but also related blog posts, downloads and other sections of my website as well as area specific sponsor ads.

I know I can specify individual templates within each forum/forum group. That gives me the control to manually add hard-coded links to other section. Not really ideal, when I have almost 50 different forums. Also this doesn't allow me to change template of the forum view for each forum group.

What I need is really the ability to add individual DotNetNuke modules on the different pages. Not like now where the modules are the same, no matter what forum/forum group you are in.

This ability is very important for the whole structure of my website, so I would love to hear from anyone who have done something like this with DotNetNuke.

/Erik

(PS: Running DNN 6.1.2 and newest AF Enterprise)

Erik,

This is done on the web all over the place by displaying content based on search queries. Google, Yahoo, and all the major search engines will show you Ad content and links based on queries, delivering you relevant content.

The only thing that I can think of is to find a module, or custom develop one that displays content based on "tags, keywords, or URLs" found on the page. I can think of a way I could use XMOD Pro to do this.

ALSO: You may want to look into Data Springs Dynamic Views.

You can create a custom SQL Query based on the CurrentURL, URLReferrer, UserID, IPAddress, and a few more options.

I'm quite sure you can create a template and a custom view for your URLs.

Example:

Create a custom template based on each one of your forum URLs.

Place one instance of the module on the page.

The viewstate of the module changes depending on the current URL.

I'm quite sure you can accomplish this. XMOD PRO might be a valuable asset as well for what you're doing.

Good luck with this. Excellent idea.

- Patrick

Thank you Patrick, I will look into these options.

Then that part is solved, but then the other question remains. How to transfer information from the currently displayed forum/thread/post in Active Forums to the module "outside" of Active Forums. Is there any way that a module can read information of what is currently displayed in another module?

/Erik

Hi Erik.

My suggestion was somewhat wide-spread. 

You can create a custom view that displays data based on the current URL. Each forum has it's own URL, and therefore you should be able to create content that is URL based with a custom view module of some sort.

Active Forums has a couple additional modules that come with it. 1. Whatsnew 2. Forumview

You can attach the forumview module to any other module throughout your website using a module wrapper. You can set the forumview module to only display content from a particular forum group, or an actual forum within a group. 

Please understand that I haven't looked at the table structure for Active Forums. However, if it's friendly enough you can create a custom view that pulls data from a particular table column(s).

Ben or Will would have to step in to explain the best way to pull custom view data from Active Forums. 

Your question: "Is there any way that a module can read information of what is currently displayed in another module?" is a somewhat large inquiry, as there are a ton of different modules that have the capability to pull data from the database. As far as modules that are specifically created to integrate with Active Forums which allow this to be done easily through a user-interface - I doubt it.

Using the ForumView module that comes with Active Forums might produce many of the results you're looking for. I would take a look at it.

Thank you Patrick. I was actually not aware of this ActiveForumViewer module. It's not quite what I was looking for, but I think that this module will allow me to do what I need with a little tweaking.

The only thing I'm afraid with this module, then I am going to create lots of duplicate content as the individual forums and posts now gets a different URL. The ability to add a canonical url would have helped here.