Customizing the UVG Tab Layout

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, September 09, 2008 to DotNetNuke, DNN Tips and Tricks

In an earlier post, I discussed the UltraVideoGallery module from Biz Modules Solutions. Out of the box, UVG has a well thought out layout and includes most of the functionality you’d expect to create your own YouTube clone.

Indeed, it may well include more functionality than you want! For example, the UVG_VideoList sub-module by default offers 5 tabs to sort videos:

We’ve elected to not use the “ratings” or “featured video” options of UVG for our site. We hand pick all videos to be included on the site, so they are all 5 star videos in our opinion. For the same reason, none of them should be “featured” over other videos and therefore wanted our tab layout to look like this:

Unfortunately, UVG does not offer an easy way to customize the tab layout within its admin panel. So, we reached out to Pengtsen at Biz Modules for a solution. His quick response scared me, because it requires editing some of the underlying UVG code. I do not like touching programming code and I am not eager to bull-in-the-china-shop my way through changing it.

But, I took a chance and followed Pengtsen’s directions exactly and unbelievably, it worked! So, if I can do it, anyone can. Here’s how:

1. From an FTP client, navigate to the DesktopModules/UltraVideoGallery/ folder on your DNN install.
2. Copy the ucOrderTypePicker.ascx file to your local computer.
3. Make a backup copy of this file before editing it.
4. Open the file in Notepad or any other text editor.
5. Don’t freak out. You don’t have to understand what you see.
6. Search for the name of the tab you want to remove by using the Find (usually Ctrl+F on your keyboard) command and entering the name of the tab with no spaces (RecentlyFeatured in our example.)
7. Look for 3 lines of code just above the first mention of “ID=lnkRecentlyFeatured” as highlighted below:
   
   
8. Insert visible="false" on all 3 lines as shown in the following image:
   
   
9. Repeat steps 6 – 8 by searching for “TopRated” and enditing 3 lines of code just above the first mention of “ID=lnkTopRated.”
10. Save this file with the same name and upload it to your DNN portal, overwriting the original file already there.

Now do a hard refresh (Ctrl+F5) in your browser and that’s it. Enjoy!

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