Dave Burke : Freelance .NET Web Developer specializing in Online Communities

We talked about using the SueetieApplications model to obtain context information anywhere in a Sueetie Community. We demonstrated how to obtain a SueetieApplication object with SueetieApplications.Current to learn the current application’s type, its application key, whether it’s part of a group, and so on. The next logical step was to build the UI administrative component.  That feature has now surfaced as part of the upcoming Gummy Bear 1.2 release. Here is a snapshot of the Sueetie.com Control Panel Applications Administration page.

The Application Management service doesn’t create or remove the applications themselves, but it enables us to add, deactivate applications and for the first time change the site layout.  We can use “http://site.com/discussions” instead of “http://site.com/forum” for instance.  It also enables us to dynamically adapt to different site configurations, making each of the applications optional. A Sueetie Community site can consist of only forums, or five blogs and no forum, whatever. There’s more supporting work to be done on that score, but we’re well on our way.

I extended our SueetieApplications class a bit so we can use it to take actions based on the application configuration defined on the administration page rather than the current application context only.  Here’s an example of using SueetieApplications on the Sueetie Registration CreateUser() logic to determine if the Forums application is installed and create a YAF Forum User accordingly.

As you can see in both the screenshot and in the SueetieApplication Intellisense properties, we’re laying the groundwork for groups as well, so all kinds of fun stuff is going on in Sueetieville these days.