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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
DotNetNuke is an open-source Content Management System and web application framework. DotNetNuke has taken the Microsoft world by storm and now at version 4, its community has grown to over 200,000 users.
This book covers virtually everything you need to know to get your DotNetNuke website up and running. Concisely written and with clear explanations, this book is covers installation, administration, deployment, site creation and all of the basic built in DotNetNuke modules. For developers, chapters on the core architecture, skinning and custom modules, including coverage of the DAL+, give you the skills to customize and extend your site.
The book starts off by giving you a deep understanding of working with basic DotNetNuke sites, guiding you through the features and giving you the confidence to create and manage your site.
After that, you will journey to the heart of DotNetNuke, and learn about its core architecture. Always concise, relevant and practical, you will find out what makes DotNetNuke tick, and from there, you will be ready to customize DotNetNuke. Developers will enjoy the detailed walkthrough of creating a new custom modules. Special emphasis is given to the DAL+, an extended feature set of the DotNetNuke Data Access Layer (DAL). You will see how to create custom modules with the DAL+, and invigorate your module development.
Web designers will enjoy the material on skinning, helping them to create a new look for their site. You will learn about creating new skins, and packaging them up for easy deployment.
You will master all of this as you leap into the development of a DotNetNuke 4 site.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 323
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006
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Table of Contents
Building Websites with VB.NET and DotNetNuke 4
Daniel N. Egan
Michael Washington
Steve Valenzuela
Building Websites with VB.NET and DotNetNuke 4
Copyright © 2006 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: October 2006
Production Reference: 1290906
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 1-904811-99-X
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by www.visionwt.com
Credits
Authors
Daniel N. Egan
Michael A. Washington
Steve Valenzula
Additional Material
Charles Nurse
Reviewers
Jerry Spohn
Jim Wooley
Development Editor
Douglas Paterson
Technical Editors
Mithil Kulkarni
Bhushan Pangaonkar
Editorial Manager
Dipali Chittar
Indexer
Mithil Kulkarni
Proofreader
Chris Smith
Layouts and Illustrations
Shantanu Zagade
Cover Designer
Shantanu Zagade
About the Authors
Daniel Egan has held a variety of positions in the information technology and engineering fields over the last nine years. Currently, he is a System Development Specialist for Automated Data Processing's Southern California region, working extensively in database applications and web development. Daniel is an MCP and MCSD.
In addition to his development work, he teaches a VB.NET Certification course at California State University, Fullerton as well as serves on its .NET Advisory board. He is also the founder and chief author of Dot Net Doc (www.DotNetDoc.com), a .NET and DNN developer resource website built using the DotNetNuke framework. He has written numerous articles on DotNetNuke and the underlying DNN architecture. He is also the founder of the LA/Orange County DNN Usergroup and is currenly working on two DNN-related projects: DNNUsergroup Online (www.DNNUGOnline.com), a portal designed to allow usergroups to broadcast their meetings online, and DotNetNuke Radio, a live internet radio show about DotNetNuke.
Michael Washington is a website developer and an ASP.NET, C#, and Visual Basic programmer. He is a DotNetNuke Core member and has been involved with DotNetNuke for over three years. He is the author of numerous DotNetNuke modules and tutorials. He is one of the founding members of the Southern California DotNetNuke Users group (www.socaldug.org). He has a son, Zachary, and resides in Los Angeles with his wife Valerie.
Steve Valenzula is the manager of the University Extended Education (UEE) IT Department at California State University, Fullerton, where he has worked for the last five years. Steve has worked specifically with DotNetNuke for over two years, in that time re-designing and delivering various Extended Education websites on the DotNetNuke portal framework as well as designing and delivering custom modules that support the function of University Extended Education.
Charles Nurse has been developing software for more than 25 years. He is owner of his own consulting business, Keydance Computer Services, and has been a DotNetNuke developer for over three years, the last two years as a Trustee. He was lead developer on the .NET 2 version of DotNetNuke (DNN 4.0).
A native of Bristol, England, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from Oxford University. In 1978, he moved to Canada to continue his studies at the University of Bristish Columbia where he obtained a Ph.D. (also in Chemistry), and where he met his wife Eileen. More recently (2003) he completed a Post Baccalaureate Certificate in Object Technology Programming at Simon Fraser University.
He is in the process of developing his own DotNetNuke Developer Resource site (www.dnndevzone.com) where he will be providing articles for developing for and with DotNetNuke.
He lives in Langley, BC, Canada with his wife and two children, both students at Simon Fraser University.
About the Reviewers
Jerry Spohn has been working with computers since the age of 11, at which he first began learning programming on a Commodore VIC 20. Times have changed, and he moved through the interesting world of IBM mainframes into PCs. After taking numerous courses on database design, programming, and object-oriented methodologies, he moved into Visual Basic and other Microsoft languages.
Jerry currently works as a Development Manager for a medium-sized software company in Pennsylvania. He also manages over 25 different websites using DotNetNuke, and is the owner of Spohn Software LLC, which does custom development across the entire Microsoft development toolset.
Jim Wooley began working on portals by building his own engine base on XML and XSLT. Just as he was about to release it, the IBuySpy Portal was released.
Promptly dumping his custom solution, he has been working on extending and deploying a number of IBuySpy and DotNetNuke portals. He is always striving to stay at the forefront of technology and enjoys the thrill of a new challenge. In addition, he attempts to pass on the insights he has gained by being active in the community, including leading the Atlanta VB Study Group and serving as INETA NorAm Membership Manager for the Georgia region.
Introduction
DotNetNuke is a free, open-source evolution of Microsoft's celebrated ASP.NET reference implementation, the IBuySpy portal solution kit. DotNetNuke began life as a framework for constructing data-driven intranet and Internet portal applications, and has now developed into an advanced web content management system with tools to manage a dynamic and interactive data-driven website. The DotNetNuke portal framework allows you to quickly create a fully featured community-driven website, complete with standard modules, user registration, and integrated security. This free open-source application puts a staggering range of functionality into your hands, and, either by using it as is or by customizing it to your requirements, you are giving your projects a great head start.
Supported and tested by thousands of developers in the DotNetNuke community across the world, the DotNetNuke framework, on one hand, offers you the luxury of a well-tested and proven architecture, and on the other, the ability to manage your site through an easy web-based administration system.
The book is structured to help you understand, implement, and extend the DotNetNuke framework; it will take you inside DotNetNuke, allowing you to harness its power for easily creating your own websites.
What This Book Covers
Chapter 1 introduces DotNetNuke (DNN) and discusses the meaning and purpose of web portals, and the common aspects of successful web portals. It looks at different types of open-source web portals, and discusses why we selected DotNetNuke for this book. We then meet our fictional client Coffee Connections and, using user stories, gather the requirements needed to build this client's site.
In Chapter 2 we see how to install a local version of DotNetNuke with Microsoft SQL Server and SQL Server 2005 Express, and cover setting the required permissions on your machine to run DNN properly.
In Chapter 3 we cover users, roles, and pages. Users are the individuals who visit or administer your portal, and their power depends on the roles that they have been assigned. We discuss how each page of your portal can be administered differently, laying the foundation for the rest of the book. From defining users, to registration, to security roles, this chapter will help you to begin administering a DNN portal.
In Chapter 4 we cover the standard modules that come pre-packaged with DotNetNuke. We cover their basic uses as well as situations they may be used in. You will use these modules to build your portal's content.
Chapter 5 introduces the administrative functions available to the host and admin logins. These are special logins that have access to all areas of your portal, and are used to secure your site and make changes to its content. This chapter takes you through the tools to make sure you are comfortable with all that is available to you.
Understanding the core architecture of DNN is essential if you want to extend the system or even modify the existing code. In Chapter 6 we learn how the DotNetNuke framework builds the pages, and the major classes that drive it.
In Chapters 7 and 8 we take the knowledge we learned in the last chapter and use it to build a custom module. You will learn everything you need to know to start building your own modules so you can extend the capabilities of your portal. After creating your user controls, you will create your data access and business logic layers. In Chapter 8 you will learn about the DotNetNuke Data Access Layer (DAL) and the DAL+, which take much of the routine work out creating custom modules. We finish our look at development by seeing how to package your module for distribution.
Chapter 9 talks about skins. A skin is the outer layer of your site, and defines the look and feel of the portal. In this chapter we design a custom skin for the Coffee Connections site. You will learn the skills needed to skin both your portal and your module containers.
When you finally have your portal the way you want it to look and function, you are ready to deploy it, and that is what Chapter 10 shows you how to do. The chapter advises on what you should look for in a web host and helps to steer you clear of common deployment mistakes.
In Chapter 11 we show you how to take advantage of one of the most exciting features of DotNetNuke: multiple portals. These are additional portals that use the same underlying database, but can contain different content. So instead of just having one website, you can create as many as you need using just one DotNetNuke installation. From parent portals to child portals, this chapter gives you the information necessary to create new portals from scratch or to use the new template structure built into the framework.
What You Need for Using This Book
This book has been written both for the beginner wanting to set up a website and also for ASP.NET developers with a grasp of VB.NET. No prior knowledge of DotNetNuke is assumed. To work with the DotNetNuke code, you will need access to Visual Studio .NET 2005 or Visual Web Developer 2005 Express.
This book uses the DotNetNuke open-source project available from http://www.DotNetNuke.com. To install and run DotNetNuke, you will need:
You can download SQL Server 2005 Express Edition for free from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/sql/download/. Visual Web Developer 2005 Express can be downloaded for free from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/download/.
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Chapter 1. What is DotNetNuke?
From company intranets to mom and pop shops to local chapters of the 4H club, most organizations are looking to have a presence on the World Wide Web. Open-source web portals answer this demand by providing easy-to-install-and-use websites that are not only extremely functional but also free. Whether it is to sell services or to have a place to meet, web portals play an important part in communications on the Web.
In this chapter, we will first discuss what web portals are and what successful web portals have in common. We will explore different types of open-source web portals and discuss why we selected DotNetNuke for our project over other available portals. In addition, we will cover the benefits gained by using an established program as a framework and the benefits of DotNetNuke specifically. We will then introduce Coffee Connections, our fictional client. We will get a brief overview of Coffee Connections, determine the specific requirements for its website, and gather the requirements using user stories. This will give you a general overview of what to expect from this book and how to best use it depending on your role and experience with web portals and Visual Basic .NET.
Open-Source Web Portals
So what does it actually mean to have a web portal? We begin the chapter with an explanation of what a portal is, and then go on to the features of a web portal and reasons for selecting open-source web portals.
What is a Web Portal?
You have decided to start a portal and first need to find out what makes a web portal. Does throwing up a few web pages with links to different topics make it a web portal? A portal, in its most basic sense, aims to be an entry point to the World Wide Web. Portals will typically offer services such as search engines, links to useful pages, news, forums, and email, all in an effort to draw users to their site. In most
cases, portals provide these services free in the hope that users will make the site their home page or at least come back often. Successful examples include Yahoo! and MSN. These sites are horizontal portals because they typically attract a wide audience and primarily exist to produce advertising income for their owners. Other web portals may focus on a specific group of users or be part of a corporate intranet. They will most often concentrate on one particular subject, like gardening or sports. This type of portal is a vertical portal because they focus inward and cater to a selected group of people.
The type of portal you create depends on the target audience you are trying to attract. You may discover that the portal you create is a combination of both horizontal and vertical portals in order to address specific needs, while simultaneously giving a broader range of services to your visitors. Whatever type of portal you decide on, horizontal or vertical, they both will share certain key characteristics and functionality that guarantee users will return to your site.
Common Portal Features
What makes a great portal? Is it a free prize giveaway, local weather forecasts, or sports scores for the teams you watch? While this package of extras might attract some users, you will certainly miss a large group of people who have no interest in these offerings. There are as many web portals to choose from as programming languages they are written in. However, one thing is for certain: there are particular services your portal should incorporate in order for it to be successful and attract a wide audience.
commonest uses for a web portal is content management. It allows users to have one place to upload, download, and search for a file that is important to them or their company. It also alleviates the problem of having more than one copy of a document. If the document is stored only in one location, you will always have the current copy.
Community Interaction: People have always found a place to meet. From the malt shop on Main Street to your local church, people like to find others who have the same interests. This is one of the main drawing powers of a web portal. Whether you are a Christian looking for other Christians (http://www.christianwebsite.com/) or someone who is interested in Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) (http://www.pdabuzz.com) there is a web portal out there for you. Web portals offer different ways for users to communicate. Among these are discussion forums that allow you to either post a question or comment to a message board or comment on the posts of others. Chat rooms take this a step further with the ability to talk to one or more persons "live" and have your questions answered immediately. One of the most interesting ways to express your opinions or communicate your ideas to others on a web portal is to use a blog. A blog (also known as a weblog) is sort of like a diary on the Web, except you do not lock it when you are done writing in it. Instead, you make all your thoughts and observations available to the world. These blogs range in topic from personal and comical (http://weblog.herald.com/column/davebarry/) to technical (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu) and, in recent years, have exploded on the scene as the de facto way to communicate on the Internet. Most web portals will offer at least one of these ways to communicate.Security & Administration: Web portal security not only manages who can access particular sections of the site but also enables administrators to access, add, and change content on the site. Most web portals use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) style editor that allows users to add and edit content without needing to know programming or HTML. It is as simple as adding content to a text file. Having users authenticate with the portal allows you to tailor the site to individuals so that they can customize their experience.Why DotNetNuke?
When the time comes to decide how you want to build your portal, you will have to make many decisions: Do I create my portal from scratch? If not, which web portal framework should I use? What type of hardware and software do I have available to me? Moreover, what is my skill level in any particular platform? In this section, we will discuss some of the better-known portals that are available.
For our portal, we have decided that it would be counter-productive to start from scratch. Instead, we will be using an already developed framework in designing our portal. We will have many options from which to select. We will discuss a few of our options and determine why we believe DotNetNuke fits us best.
PHP-Nuke
Most likely the grandfather of DotNetNuke (in name at least) is PHP-Nuke (http://www.phpnuke.org). PHP-Nuke is a web portal that uses PHP (a recursive acronym for Hypertext Preprocessor) pages to create dynamic web pages. You can use it in a Windows environment but it is most comfortable in a Linux/Unix environment. PHP is an open-source, HTML-embedded scripting language, which is an alternative to Microsoft's ASP (Active Server Pages) the precursor to ASP.NET, which is the programming language used in DotNetNuke. PHP-Nuke, like DotNetNuke, is a modular system that comes with pre-built standard modules and allows you to enhance the portal by creating custom modules. Since we will be using a Windows platform, and are more comfortable using ASP.NET, this choice would not fit our needs.
Metadot
Metadot Portal Server is another open-source portal system available to those looking to create a web portal. Metadot states that "its user friendly environment" allows non-technical individuals to create powerful websites with just a "few clicks of the mouse". Like PHP-Nuke, Metadot runs primarily on the Linux operating system (although, it supports Windows as well), Apache web server, and a MySQL database. It uses Perl as its scripting language. For the same reasons as PHP-Nuke, this framework will not fit our needs.
Rainbow
Similar to DotNetNuke, the Rainbow project is an open-source initiative to build a CMS (content management system) based on the IBuySpy portal using Microsoft's ASP.NET. In contrast to DotNetNuke, the Rainbow Project used the C# implementation of IBuySpy as its starting point. It does run on Windows and uses ASP.NET, but our language of choice for this project is VB.NET so we will rule out Rainbow.
DotNetNuke
So why did we select DotNetNuke as the web portal of choice for this book? Well here are a few reasons for selecting DotNetNuke:
custom skins free on websites like core team member Nina Meiers' eXtra Dimensions Design Group (http://www.xd.com.au), and Snowcovered (http://www.snowcovered.com). These give you the ability to change the look and feel of your site without having to know anything about design, HTML, or programming.
Supports multiple portals: Another advantage of using DotNetNuke as your web portal of choice is the fact that you can run multiple portals using one code base and one database. This means you can have different portals for different groups on the same site but still have all of the information reside in one database. This gives you an advantage in the form of easy access to all portal information, and a central place to manage your hosting environment. The framework comes with numerous tools for banner advertising, site promotion, hosting, and affiliate management.Designed with an extensible framework: You can extend the framework in a number of ways. You can modify the core architecture of the framework to achieve your desired results (we will discuss the pratfalls of doing this in later chapters) and design custom modules that "plug in" to the existing framework. This would be in addition to the pre-built modules that come with DotNetNuke. These basic modules give you a great starting point and allow you to get your site up and running quickly.Mature portal framework: As of the writing of this book, DotNetNuke is on version 4.2. It means that you will be using an application that has gone through its paces. It has been extensively tested and is widely used as a web portal application by thousands of existing users. What this affords you is stability. You can be comfortable knowing that thousands of websites already use the DotNetNuke framework for their web portal needs.Active and robust community: Community involvement and continuing product evolution are very important parts of any open-source project and DotNetNuke has both of these. The DotNetNuke support forum is one of the most active and dynamic community forums on the ASP.NET website. There are currently over 280,000 users registered on the DotNetNuke website. At the time of writing, the much-anticipated DotNetNuke version 4.2 had just been released, and has brought about a significant number of improvements over its previous releases. The core team continues to move forward, always striving towards a better product for the community.Recognized by the Microsoft team as a best-practices application: In March 2004 at the VSLive conference in San Francisco, the premiere conference for Visual Studio .NET Developers, DotNetNuke 2.0 was officially released, and showcased for the public. This gave DotNetNuke a great leg up in the open-source portal market and solidified its position as a leader in the field.Benefits of Using an Established Program
Whether you are building a website to gather information about your soccer club or putting up a department website on your company's intranet, one thing is certain-to write your web portal from the ground up, you should plan on "coding" for a long time. Just deciding on the structure, design, and security of your site will take you months. After all this is complete, you will still need to test and debug. At this point, you still have not even begun to build the basic functionality of your web portal.
So why start from scratch when you have the ability to build on an existing structure? Just as you would not want to build your own operating system before building a program to run on it, using an existing architecture allows you to concentrate on enhancing and customizing the portal for your specific needs. If you are like me and use Visual Studio to do your development, then you already adhere to this concept. There is no need for you to create the basic building blocks of your application (forms, buttons, textboxes, etc.); instead you take the building blocks already there for you and assemble (and sometimes enhance) them to suit your needs.
The DotNetNuke Community
The DotNetNuke community has one of the most active and dynamic support forums on the ASP.NET website and has over 280,000 users registered on the DotNetNuke website.
Core Team
The core team comprises individuals invited to join the team by Shaun Walker, whom they affectionately call the "Benevolent Dictator". Their invitations were based on their contributions and their never-ending support of others in the DotNetNuke forum. Each team member has a certain area of responsibility based on his or her abilities. From database functionality and module creation to skinning, they are the ones responsible for the continued advancement of the framework. However, not being a member of the core team does not mean that you cannot contribute to the project. There are many ways for you to help with the project. Many developers create custom modules they make freely available to the DotNetNuke community. Other developers create skins they freely distribute. Still others help answer the many questions in the DotNetNuke forum. You can also be a contributor to the core architecture. You are welcome to submit code improvements to extend, and/or expand the capabilities of DotNetNuke. These submissions will be evaluated by the core team and could possibly be added to the next version.
The DotNetNuke Discussion Forum
When the DotNetNuke project started, one of the things that helped to propel forward its popularity was the fact that its forums were housed on the ASP.NET forums website (http://www.asp.net/forums/showforum.aspx?forumid=90). With well over 200,000 individual posts in the main DotNetNuke forum alone, it was, and continues to be one of the most active and attentive forums on the ASP.NET forums website (http://www.asp.net/forums/). Beginning sometime after the version 3.x release, the DotNetNuke team puts its finishing touches on its own forum module. It now utilizes this module for most new DotNetNuke questions (http://www.dotnetnuke.com/tabid/795/Default.aspx). In both forums, you will find help for any issue you may be having in DotNetNuke.
