For the last year and half I have increasingly turned to one module as my goto solution when building out new capabilities. For me the Reports Module is proving itself to be the Swiss Army knife of the DotNetNuke module world. With some of the features coming up in future releases of the Reports module this will become even more evident to anyone who takes the time to learn how to use the module.
So why do I feel so strongly about the reports module? It is mainly because of the architecture that Andrew Nurse put in place to allow you to create custom data sources and custom visualizers. This architecture makes it easy to get data from almost anywhere and then to have complete control over how it is displayed.
For most people the built in DotNetNuke Data Source, and XSLT Visualizer can handle most of your needs. You can query any data in DotNetNuke and then use XSLT to display that data. If you have not used XSLT before, you are missing out on a very powerful tool. Whether it is displaying a blogroll, the MarketPlace Monitor or even building an entire eCommerce site, XSLT gives you a lot of capability to take XML data and transform it into as simple or complex a page as you can imagine.
More...