What is a Sitefinity Module?
Modules are quite probably the most powerful feature of Sitefinity. They allow you to extend Sitefinity in any way you need it to be extended. Need a image gallery on your site? How about blog aggregation tool? Or maybe product catalog? All this you can do by taking advantage of Sitefinity. Now, to see why is this so cool, think for a moment : You already have everything done except that particular functionality (e.g. blog aggregation tool). You don’t have to worry about the site navigation (already done), you don’t need to create an admin area (already done), you don’t need to worry about approval system (already done) etc.
Asp.NET practices
So, at this point you may think, that’s all nice and dandy… but it’ll take forever to learn how integrate my functionality into Sitefinity. Not so. I’m the best proof of that, since I’ve joined Sitefinity team just few weeks ago and I’m already building a module, heck… I’m blogging on how to do it. Namely, the architecture of modules is following all the best practices of for Asp.NET so most of the things will come natural to you. In addition to that, well tought architecture will simply (and unknowlingly) force you in building easy-to-maintain-and-extend modules. Take my word on this…
Now, to avoid risk of sounding like yet another marketer trying to sell you an idea, I’ll admit that you do need to understand some fundamental ideas of Sitefinity Modules. I had few problems on my own, and therefore I’m writing this series in hope to help you avoid these problems in the beginning.
Conclusion
This series will probably be extensive since I’ll try to cover as much of the process along the way, however at the end I’ll distill it into a “quick start” type of article. In the next blog post I’ll describe the basic concepts and ideas that you need to understand about any module. Then I’ll start to build a sampe module and provide you with some source code. So stay tuned…