.Net Jonesie - DotNetNuke again

Friday, October 21, 2005

DotNetNuke again by peter@jonesie.net.nz

I've been planning an upgrade to the NZ .Net site for the end of the year so I thought I should take a look at DotNetNuke 3 again. The last time I looked was about, oh, 5 months ago. It's now on version 3.1.1 and wow! It has progressed a lot in that time.

Installation

The installation doesn't appear to have altered very much. As usual, I tried a complex install and failed, then did the basic install - when will I ever learn! I was trying to get the ASP.Net membership database installed separately from DNN but the DNN installer runs all the scripts in the DNN database. I'm sure I can run the scripts manually and get this working.

I want to do this so I can test the integration with Community Server 1.2 when it's available but with some of the new modules now in DNN, I'm not sure how much of CS we will use.

Skins

There's a couple of new skins in the default package, but nothing much to write home about. I (or someone else) will still need to create a new skin.

Blogs

NewBlog is the new default blog module for DNN but you have to download this (and all other non core modules) separately. I suppose this makes the installation simpler.

NewBlog has most of the standard features you'd expect. You can create as many blogs as you like and categories them. You can create posts online but I'm not sure if there is an API for posting.

Forums

The new forum module is a vast improvement over the old discussions module. This looks and feels similar to CS forums, but without a lot of the advanced features. It's more than adequate for most purposes though.

The forums in CS still look a better option, mainly becuase of the new listserv functionality coming with CS 1.2, but also because it's a more focused application that will most likely handle the traffic better. But, skinning CS is a real pain.

That's as far as I've progressed today. My next step is to try and separate the ASP Membership schema so I can test the CS integration. In theory, it might be possible to integrate with CS 1.1 and if I'm feeling ambitious then I'll give that a spin but I suspect I'll need to wait a couple of weeks for CS 1.2.

To upgrade the NZ .Net site I'll need to figure out what to do with user accounts and permissions - I'm not sure I can upgrade these from DNN 212. A manual import of these may be possible. And then there's all the existing content. The last time I tried an automatic upgrade to DNN 3 from DNN 212 it was less than useful.

There's a couple of custom modules in the existing site and some 3rd party controls. I have XMod for DNN 3 so that covers a lot of the customisation, but there are a few things that will probably get thrown out and replaced with standard modules.

Friday, October 21, 2005 6:24:34 AM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

Comments [2] General |

Saturday, October 22, 2005 3:13:36 PM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

you can stop DNN installing the memberrole scripts by setting <add key="InstallMemberRole" value="false"/> in the web.config. I don't believe there is an integrated version of communityserver with DNN. They hired a developer (I think he's called Dan Bartels) many months back to do this, but I've heard little. Best to search the communityserver forums.

Cathal

cathal

Saturday, October 22, 2005 11:57:10 PM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try.

As for the integration, at this point, I'm realy just after shared logins so I should be able to do this.

Peter

Comments are closed.