About Dot Net Nuke
DotNetNuke's content management system allows non-technical users to create and edit content, and add custom features and personalize the site look and feel. It can be further expanded with addition of third party modules and tailored with custom graphics and layouts in the form of skins.
The DotNetNuke Corporation provides an open source version of DotNetNuke called the Community Edition. It includes:
- access to the source code of the framework
- the core modules,
- and an MIT license allowing flexible modification and distribution rights.
The Community Edition a popular web content management (WCM) system and application development framework for ASP.NET, with over 6,000,000 downloads and 400,000 production web sites as of September 2009.
Features of DNN
- Content Management – Add pages and edit content easily without a propeller-head in sight.
- Modules – Extend the capabilities of your website using Plug-in Modules. We have a wide selection of useful modules listed below.
- Newsletters – Send out e-mail newsletters to your clients using the built in tool
- Site Statistics – Useful statistics on how your site is performing
- Google Submission – Tell Google about your site to help with your search engine rankings
- Recycle Bin – Just in case you delete something by accident.
- Secure Online Area – Give staff or clients login access to secure areas of your website.
- Graphic Design Template (Skins) – Use one of our standard templates or we can create one for you.
DotNetNuke Professional edition
The DotNetNuke Corporation offers two business-oriented commercial editions of the software with premium functionality and technical support options.
The DotNetNuke Professional Edition was introduced in February 2009 with version 5.0, and most recent version 5.1.4 was released in September 2009. It is described by DotNetNuke Corporation as a tested and verified version of the DotNetNuke content management system[8], and directly shares the framework codebase with the Community Edition while additionally providing further functionality and support for use in business critical applications.
The Professional Edition offers full product documentation, email notifications of security patches and product updates, access to the Professional Edition online knowledge base, online and email product support with second level support from DotNetNuke Corp architects and engineers and product copyright indemnification.
The DotNetNuke Elite Edition was released in August 2009, providing enhanced support features including phone support, and access to Professional Edition source code in the Elite Edition Premiere version. Similarly to the Professional Edition, the Elite Edition includes extra functionality and shares the framework codebase with the open source Community Edition.
Architecture
DotNetNuke uses a three-tier architecture model with a core framework providing support to the extensible modular structure. When deployed, which can be extended using pluggable modules and providers that enable additional functionality; the look and feel of individual sites can be customized using skins. The following diagram illustrates the software layers of a typical DotNetNuke deployment:
The current, 5.x generation of DotNetNuke requires IIS 6 and ASP.NET v2.0 to v3.5 and supports SQL Server 2005 and 2008. Previous generations of DotNetNuke supported SQL Server 2000 and ASP.NET v1.1.
Modules
The default functionality of DotNetNuke can be expanded by adding third-party modules, either from an existing library of free and commercial modules, or through in-house development of custom functionality. The DotNetNuke framework provides basic functionality such as security, user administration and content management, while modules are used to tailor the web site for specific deployment needs.
Core Modules
A set of primary modules are included with the core DotNetNuke distribution. These modules provide the functionality required to create an e-commerce system, and intranet, a public web site or a custom web application. They are maintained by a volunteer team community on the DotNetNuke Community Forge.
3rd Party Modules
Further modules can be downloaded from Snowcovered, a marketplace of third-party DotNetNuke modules and skins. As of September 2009, over 6,000 modules and Skins are available, including:
- e-commerce systems,
- photo galleries,
- localization modules,
- blogs,
- forums,
- wiki,
- social networking functionality
- and many others.
Modules are available in both free and paid versions from the open source community and proprietary commercial DotNetNuke developers.
A module can be uploaded and automatically installed on a DotNetNuke installation through the administration pages of DotNetNuke. Once a module is added by the administrator, it can be placed on any of the pages in the web site and custom access permission can be configured for it.
Skins
DotNetNuke has a skinning architecture which provides a separation between design and content, enabling a web designer to develop skins without requiring any specialist knowledge of development in ASP.NET: only knowledge of HTML and an understanding of how to prepare and package the skins themselves is required. Skins consist of basic HTML files with placeholders (tokens) for content, menus and other functionality, along with support files such as images, style sheets and JavaScript, packaged in a ZIP file.
Upon Microsoft's release of the .NET Framework version 2, Microsoft had included functionality known as master pages. The principle idea behind master pages was to encourage code recycling and consistent design and aesthetics throughout a site by creating a master page with placeholders, which at runtime would be compiled and replaced by content.
Although this advancement was considered significant, DotNetNuke decided to keep its skinning engine, using the argument that to construct master pages, a web designer needed access to Microsoft's Visual Studio, which would then put developer code at a risk (as master pages have the ability to contain VB.NET code). Bearing in mind that a significant proportion of web designers choose to use both Windows and Mac OS-based design software, DotNetNuke decided to retain the skinning engine to retain its open-source ideals and availability to the web design community.
Like modules, compiled ("ZIPped") skins can be uploaded and automatically installed through the administration pages. If the compiled skin does not contain an ASP.NET user control file, then the DotNetNuke skinning engine builds one based on various tokens included in the HTML file which refer to various sections, placeholders and/or modules of a DotNetNuke-produced page. A number of discussions on the DotNetNuke forums debate the differences between designing skins in "pure" HTML and Cascading Style Sheets, or creating skins in Visual Studio as ASP.NET user controls[15].
Since version 4.4, skin developers have been able to specify skin-level DOCTYPEs to allow them to develop skins that follow accessibility and XHTML standards.
Awards
DotNetNuke has won awards, including: