This Request For Comments if here to discuss the data structure of the module. I am starting some charts now that I will add here and then we can discuss the approach...

This Request For Comments is about the User Interface of the module. At this stage we mainly need quick mockups (wireframes) of the different views.

At a minimum, we need:

• Public List View
• Public Detail View (for each extension)
• Administration of the module (probably need a couple views here, for administrators that need to be able to edit everything)
• An edit view for the maintainers of each extension (we may need a list/detail here if a maintainer maintains multiple extensions)
• A github grid view to replace the excel spreadsheet I have been using for the core modules. This needs advanced filtering and sorting but does not need to be good looking or responsive, just basically an automated spreadsheet to help me (and anyone else needing this) to quickly tirage issues and pull requests. For instance filtering for just the core modules that have open issues without tags. Or finding the oldest pull request that has the bug tag, etc.

If anyone has ideas, or want to submit some wireframes, please comment/attach here.

The Dnn Forge used to be a dnn module to aggregate all community projects in one place, it is no longer on the Dnn website and has not been maintained in many years. We have the codebase and data available but:

1. The code is very old, in Visual Basic, no assembly (uses app_code), no build scripts, etc.
2. The data is available in csv files and from a quick look, a lot of it is also outdated and has many modules that have not been maintained in multiple years.

There have been multiple separate efforts to build replacements for this:

1. nvQuickPulse at https://github.com/nvisionative/nvQuickPulse (phone app)
2. Dnn Connect Community Extensions at https://www.dnn-connect.org/community/community-extensions (correct me if I am wrong, but I think this is an open content template)
3. Dnn Community Dashboard (Cannot find a link to it right now, but will update this when I do)
4. There has been interest in revamping the old Dnn Forge module.

After taking a look at all this, I would like us to build a new Forge module instead of revamping the old one. Something more modern that will fulfill our current needs and could become the single source of truth for the data used by other tools (the ones above and maybe one day reintegrate this into the Dnn Extensions UI). This new module would be placed on the upcoming new dnn community website.

I was thinking we could then manually load the relevant (still available) modules by hand from the data we have from the old Forge module.

I would like that module to be able to pull metadata from repositories (I think mostly github, but depending on what we find, we could add others), thinks like latest version, last update date, number of download, number of issues, number of bugs, etc. This will allow filtering and sorting and help us have a better view of the status of all those extensions, and help us better manage the core modules too. I would also like to have some categories (core modules, free open source modules, free but not open source modules, etc.) In addition to the automatic metadata pulled from that (or those) apis, we can also add our own fields that do not exists on those apis, such as latest dnn version tested on, categories, etc.

This RFC is for collection general opinions on this project, I will add other rfcs after some discussions to define the data schema, then UI mockups, etc.

Any thoughts on this?