I’ve been spending quality latenight geek time with YetAnotherForum.NET 1.9.4 beta lately. I am so excited about the new features coming and the customizations I’m working on. The two are feeding off one another; so many new features in 1.9.4, both front-end and back are firing me up to highlight YAF.NET and bring more community services into its domain of cool. It’s difficult not to blog about what’s coming, but I never blog about something until it’s on the page. The only thing I can say is prepare for an avalanche of blog posts when YetAnotherForum.NET 1.9.4 goes live on Sueetie.com.
There are many custom ASPNET controls in YAF.NET, but not a generic <ForumLink /> control that did precisely what I wanted, support Sueetie-oriented properties with accompanying Intellisense to crank them out in a hurry.
Okay, enough with the foreplay. Here’s the control in action.
Simple, economical, does the job in Sueetie Style.
ForumLink source lives in the Sueetie.Forums project shown below, which also gives you an idea of some of the controls and objects involved in custom coding to either extend or integrate YAF.NET with the Sueetie Framework. Not much there, really, which is the way we like it.
I patterned the control from the YAF.Controls.ThemeButton control, particularly its use of full Localization support for Tags and Titles, along with support for styling, NavigationUrl and additional properties common in YetAnotherForum.NET controls.
Using the ForumLink control is real simple. You’ll notice the LinkTo Intellisense. Nice. I’ll add more pages as I need them. The LinkTo is based on YetAnotherForum.NET’s ForumPages enumerator in the YAF.Config library, a basic ingredient in YAF.NET navigation.
You can see a number of other properties supported by the control in the screenshot below, particularly the Localization properties for the url text and title at the bottom of the list. YetAnotherForum.NET uses a [Page:Tag] structure to serve up localization strings. So the logic would be [TextLocalizedPage:TextLocalizedTag] to produce the string. Because this is a Sueetie-optimized control, both “Page” properties default to “SUEETIE.” One less thing.
And that’s tonight’s Forum Fun Link Control for YetAnotherForum.NET. Thanks for reading.