Here's a quick tip to expose certain admin tools to folks outside of the Administrators role of DotNetNuke. This should work for every version of DotNetNuke available.
Say for example you have marketing people that want access to Web statistics, but you don't want to have to make them a member of the Administrators role. Sure you can add them to the Administrators role in order to view the Web stats, but this also provides them with much more permissions on your portal than is required to just view Web stats.
What we're going to do is expose just that specific functionality as a module in DNN that can be inserted into any tab in your portal. Then once you have the module within a tab, you can create a marketing role and provide access to the tab just to the folks who need it.
The first thing we need to do is expose a new module to our portal. Go to the Host tab of DotNetNuke and select Module Definitions from the drop down menu. From here just go through the basic procedure of installing a new module, but use the template option. Click on “Add New Module Definition”, then select “Template” from the drop down, and click on “Install”.
Now you should see the new template for your Admin module. Click on the template, provide a description such as Web Stats, then in the Desktop Source textbox, we're going to point to where the admin module resides, in this example for the Web logs, point to “admin/log/SiteLog.ascx”, and leave the edit module empty. Then click on “Update” to install a pointer to the admin module.
Now when you go to any tab within your portal, you can select the newly installed Web Stats module into any page within your site and expose it to anyone using the built-in security of DotNetNuke.
