DotNetMushroom RAD is now more than a year old and throughout this period we have continued investing in optimizing it, issuing new controls, and some minor issues.  However, throughout these last months we did not issue much releases.  Our idea is not to issue weekly versions with small minor updates but to issue periodic versions with lots of advanced features which can really help when one is developing a site.

In due of this policy we have, in these last months, developed major updates to RAD which we are testing and which will soon be given as demo to our partners.  Following is a list of the major updates on which we are working:

1. Text Transformation
2. Friendly and Encrypted URLs
3. myWebsite Framework

Of the three changes the most exciting one is the myWebsite framework.  This will be a development framework build on RAD and which will be a clean and simple extension over DotNetNuke. 

In the myWebsite framework your customer, the website owner, will be able to build the whole site and insert any predefined tab structure in a straightforward manner without compromising site layouts, without unnecessary giving your customer access to DotNetNuke administrator accounts and without giving your customer the liberty of break up site integrity and  designs.  The myWebsite framework will be data driven rather than tab-driven and your customer will be able to set meta-tags, meta-descriptions, page-titles, banners, links and more – all data driven.  Up till now it was difficult to have a site which uses a catalogue module and display this information into the menu without creating a tab for each category or item – with myWebsite you can do it easily and it will be your customer who decides what goes where in the menu.�

So, using the interface, see next figure, your customer will build the site.

For example, the above will result in the following menu item:

Multilanguage is also inbuilt in the myWebsite framework, making it ideal for your customer to go globally now, or maybe in the future.

Also, if your hosting provider supports the IIS URL-Rewriter, then your customer will also be able to build the URL format for each page in a hierarchal structure as your customer wants – quite a great opportunity in optimizing SEO!  Most hosting providers are supporting it (example for GoDaddy see http://help.godaddy.com/article/5443).  If this IIS extension is not provided, then you can program third party modules to do the job.  While you will still be able to use non-RAD applications in myWebsite framework, we will also issue instructions to other module developers with information on how they can integrate their application more seamlessly with the myWebsite framework.

The above page will result in the following URL:

I will be writing more articles on this subject.  We will soon launch a website built with the myWebsite framework, and we will explain how it was done.