DNN Platform on Cloud

1-click AWS Deployment    1-click Azure Deployment  1-click Google Deployment

Overview

DNN is an open source web content management system based on Microsoft.Net. It was written in VB.Net but it has been fully migrated to C# since version 6.0. There are three versions available for DNN which are community edition, professional and enterprise editions. The professional and enterprise editions have more features built in and have technical supports offered.Below are the list of features available sourced from Dotnetnuke website:

1.Unlimited online and email product support with second level support from Dotnetnuke corp. architects and engineers.
2.Full product documentation.
3.Email notifications if there are secury patches or product updates available.
4.Access to DNN online knowledge base
5.Product copyright indemnification
6.Advanced Content Approval Process – Administrators can create custom workflows with an unlimited number of states and reviewers. Workflows can be for individual module content changes or for changes to any modules on a page.
7.Granular User Permissions – Page, module and folder level extended permissions provide granular security rights which allow you to precisely define which content contributors can edit which modules on each page.

8.Document Management – A full document management solution which allows your organization to store, control and view documents online including video and media files
9.Microsoft SharePoint Connector (Enterprise Edition only) – Enables fast, secure publishing of documents stored in SharePoint to public web sites, extranets or intranets.
10.Content Staging (Enterprise Edition only) – Make and test all web site changes on a staging server prior to publishing to your production server.
11.Windows Azure and Amazon S3 Support – Compatible with Windows Azure Cloud Hosting and provides two folder provider options for Amazon S3 and Azure File Storage.
12.eCommerce Engine – Empowers organizations with a small portfolio of digital goods and services to quickly enable ecommerce on their web site.
13.User Interface Customization with Telerik RadControls – A license for Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX for an unlimited number of developers to use within your Professional Edition instance.

14.My Editable Pages – Links to all of the pages and modules in the site which a user has permission to Edit are displayed, allowing efficient page editing.
15.Page and Module Caching – Multiple caching options speed the delivery of web pages and reduce the workload on your web servers.
16.Google Analytics for Marketing – Support for advanced Google Analytics functionality such as visitor type, landing page, role, or referrer segmentation.
17.File Integrity Checking – Checks files in the installation and reports any inconsistencies which may impact web site reliability.
18.Web Server Farm Support – New caching provider delivers more efficient resource usage in web farms
19.Health Monitoring – Pings the website periodically to identify failures and will notify the site owner. Also ensures the site stays in web server memory for faster user accessibility.

How to Install DotNetNuke?

How to Install DotNetNuke?

To install DNN is quite easy as we  just need to follow few steps. The example given is using IIS 7 with SQL Server 2008 R2 and run in local computer.

1. Download DotNetNuke Community Edition from Codeplex.
Please visit http://dotnetnuke.codeplex.com/ to download the latest DNN installation file.

2. Create website folder in your wwwroot folder.

Create a website folder and setup the permission for the folder to allow Network Services has the Change permission. Copy the completed zip file and extract all the files under this folder. See below image screenshots for more details. In this example: the folder name we created we named it My Website.

Right click the folder and select Properties.

Go to the Security Tab and see if Network Service user/group is already in there. If it doesnt, click the Edit Button.

It will display a list of users/groups available. If the Network Service is not available, click the Add button.

Click the Advanced button to show the list of available users/groups

Click the Find Now to list all the users and start looking for Network Service Group/User and then click OK

Click the Network Service Row and tick Allow checkbox in Modify permission

Usually the website folder is hosted or placed under C:/inetpub/wwwroot. But it will depends on your server environment, it can be hosted outside of this folder as well.

3. Create SQL Server database.
In order to create the SQL Server database, you will need SQL management studio tool and SQL Express 2008 installed on your server. You can download these software from microsoft official website. We assume those software have already been installed on your server.

Enter the database name.

Create new user that will associate with this database. On the server explorer tree, look for the security folder and right click to create a new user login.

Enter the login name and make sure you click the SQL Server authentication mode. Untick the Enforce password expiration and change password at next login. Also in the Default Database dropdownlist, please select the created database

Next is to map the ownership of the database to this user account.

4. Setup IIS for new website.
Open the IIS and add a new website.

We enter the website address in the provided url address. Note in this example, as we run the site locally, we need to modify host config file to temporarily host the url.

The next step is to setup the application pool properties. This is important and has to be setup properly otherwise the site will have a permission issue.

Look for the application pool named mywebsite and right click and choose Advanced Settings

Make sure the ASP.Net version is 4.0 and Network Service is selected for the identity field.

5. Configure Host file (Only if the DNN run locally).
The hosts file usually located under: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc. As the file does not has an extension, you will need to open it using NotePad or other alternative text editor. Note: if you get a permission issue, you have to edit the file as administrator account.

By following up the example given, you just need to enter the local ip address and then website url. In this case, it will be like the following image:

6. Launch the website to start configuring DNN.
Open a web browser in your computer and enter the website address http://mywebsite.local.com. If everything is setup properly, you will see the following page.

By default the super account username is host, it is recommended that you change this to other name. For the website information section, you can select the template as blank template, this will not create any pages on the site, if you choose default, it will load some basic content and pages.

For the database setup, choose Custom option and the database type as SQL Server. You will need to specify the Server Name, by default server name is .\SQLExpress, but in this example, we set the sql server name differently, so specify the value accordingly. In the security option, please select user defined, as we have already create a user login for the database account. Make sure the database owner checkbox is ticked. Once all done you can click Continue button.

Implementing Workflow in a Custom DNN Module:

What is Workflow?
Workflow allows you to create a publishing flow that provides an approval process between when a user creates the content and when the content becomes live. DNN has built a few different workflow processes for the HTML and File Manager modules. Now that release 7.4 is out, third-party module developers can tap into the same workflow mechanism and definitions. Content workflow in a DNN module, when done right, has the following attributes:

Review & Approve Content
Different workflow processes can be chosen or defined
Notifications to appropriate users
Versioning and Rollback capability

Setup work for Workflow

The first thing you need to know about using the Workflow API is that it works inherently with Content Items. To do this, you need to create a content item type for your custom versioned content.The other thing we need to setup is a module setting for allowing the administrator to select the workflow they want to implement. These workflows are defined in the DNN core.

Versioning and Workflow:

1.Create New “Item”

When you save an item, this is the flow that should happen. You need to create the DAL2 item and then create the versioned content item with the Item ID as its Content Key. Then you will send that versioned content item into the workflow process.

Update an “Item”

Updating an item is not much different than the create process. You don’t need to do anything to the main item, just create the versioned item and send it to the workflow process

Workflow State Actions
So how do we control what happens when we start the workflow?  Those action state classes that we registered will get called by the framework when users interact with the workflow items from the Notifications area of the User Messaging page.

 

The DNN Platform Edition is open source. DotNetNuke is a web content management system based on Microsoft .NET. The DNN Platform was built to be extensible. Almost any feature of the platform can be swapped out. The product is used to build professional looking and easy-to-use commercial websites, social intranets, community portals, or partner extranets. Containing dynamic content of all types, DNN sites are easy to deploy and update.

DNN provides a suite of solutions for creating rich, rewarding online experiences for customers, partners and employees.

DNN Platform is owned by DNN Software (https://www.dnnsoftware.com/platform) and they own all related trademarks and IP rights for this software.

Cognosys provides hardened images of DNN Platform on all public cloud ( AWS marketplace , Azure and Google Cloud  Platform ) also offers a secured and one-click deployment of DNN Platform on cloud i.e. AWS marketplace , Azure and Google Cloud Platform with easy installation instructions.

DNN Platform on Windows 2012 R2

DNN Platform on Cloud for AWS -Windows

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