I've been hard at work designing a business directory for our neighborhood association, Newbold Neighbors, and I was enamored with the idea of not having to reinvent the wheel in terms of creating a review system.  Why do the hard work when Yelp has already done it?

I just bought another hosting plan with PowerDNN so I can begin my (slow) migration over to DotNetNuke 5.  I haven't even gotten as far as moving my own site over, but I knew that I wanted to use some of the new features for the neighborhood site (or at least I wanted new people using it to gain the advantage of never knowing some of the hang-ups/eccentricities of DNN4…)  Moving the skins and containers over was a cinch-just update the file references in the headers.  So far, so good.

I had purchased a copy of DNNDev's XMod a while back, and never really found a use for it.  I checked around SnowCovered and saw that for previous owners, the upgrade to XMod 5.5 was just $20!  What a deal-especially since it's the first version to support DNN5.  After reviewing XMod's functionality, I decided that it was definitely the right tool for the job.  Since I heart clean urls, I also went with the XMod Details View (free) which lets me show a detail view using the record id.  The only downside (actually, my biggest complaint with DNN) is the lack of slugability (I can't do /business/details/marinos-auto-repair, but I can do /business/details/id/5).

I used their tools to create a simple database of company names, phone numbers, addresses, photos, etc, and then got the layout working.

So, here's where the magic happens.  I use jQuery to get the phone number from the .phone in each .business element and pass it off to the Yelp query.  Using the callback=? is required for jQuery to perform a cross-domain JSON query.  jQuery replaces the ? with a custom identifier transparently.

I have three different views - small, regular, and details.  I want basic data displayed on the small, a bit more for regular, and some custom stuff for the details (adding in trends, individual reviews, etc).

I am pretty pleased with how it came out.  If you want to take a look, it can be found over at www.NewboldNeighbors.org/Businesses.  As someone who fancies himself a .Net programmer, jQuery has made the transition back to client-side processing fun again.  Hope this saves someone a few hours of coding.  Enjoy!