DotNetNuke Websites Problem Design Solution (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

by Tracy Wittenkeller (Author), Shaun Walker (Foreword)
Key Phrases: page functions, file location, applying skins, Building Content, Control Panel, Security Roles (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The objective of this book is to enlighten you in the ways of DotNetNuke by showing you how to design and implement a professional, real-world DNN website solution, while taking the opportunity to outline and detail many of the terrific features of the DNN framework. While describing in detail how to take full advantage of just some of DNN's feature set, the book explains explain most of the problems you'll face when building your website, and offers one or more solutions for solving them. In the end, the result will be a great deal of knowledge surrounding a key set of features that includes a myriad of functions you may not have thought were possible from an open source application framework. Many beginning to intermediate users will be surprised, by the depth and power of DNN and the ease at which professional-level, modern functionality can be implemented. More advanced users may already be utilizing DNN in similar ways but should also find the information contained in this book to be helpful and insightful.

This book is basically a large case study that starts with a foundation and works its way through to completion with a series of designs and solutions for each incremental step along the way. What sets the Problem-Design-Solution series apart from other Wrox series is the structure of the book and the start-to-finish approach to many aspects of a completed project. Specifically, this book leads the reader through the development of a complete modern, sophisticated, highly functional, and professional DNN business website solution including many of DNN's key built-in modules/functionality:

• Account login/registration, roles, and permissions

• Announcements

• FAQ

• Media

• Links

• Survey

• Text/HTML

From an administrative point of view, the following features and problems are also covered:

• Full DNN Administration to manage many aspects of the website solution

• Skin deployment

• Content deployment

The implementation of each of these features provides the opportunity to present various processes of creating, designing, and developing our DNN website solution such as the following:

• Skin and containers/site layout

• CSS customizations

• Security: site membership, roles, and profile management

• Detailed content implementation: working with pages and modules

This book covers DNN's key built-in features and demonstrates how to get the most out of them to create a complete, professional website solution. All of the features are explained and presented in detail to make you aware of all of the options that are possible. At the end of the book you will have learned many of the best practices for using DNN and will have acquired a well-rounded foundation to use it comfortably on a day-to-day basis, allowing you to gain proficiency and efficiency in developing more professional and profitable DNN website solutions.

This book provides the foundation to build a complete, professional DNN website solution based on a key set of built-in features. All chapters are self-contained components within the overall solution, build on the chapters before it, and are structured in three sections:

• Problem: This section defines the problem or problems to be addressed in the chapter: Which key DNN features should you take advantage of and why are these features important? What restrictions or other factors need to be taken into account?

• Design: After the problem is defined adequately, this section describes what features are needed to solve the problem. This will give you a broad idea of how the solution will work or how the solution to the problem will be accomplished.

• Solution: After preparing what is going to be accomplished and why (and how it solves the problem defined earlier), we will produce and discuss the code, page, and module configurations, and so on, and any other material that will realize the design and solve the problem laid out at the beginning of the chapter. Just as the coverage of this book as a whole is weighted toward solution, so is each chapter. This is where you will get hands-on practice and create the code.

This book is intended to be read from cover to cover, so that you start from scratch and finish with a complete website solution. However, the book follows a modular structure, so every chapter is quite self-contained and implements DNN features that, if necessary, can be "turned on or off" at any time.

This book is not for advanced programmers who use DNN at the core level to create modules or extend the project. This book is intended for beginning-to-intermediate users, as well as some advanced users, who want to learn:

• How to create a great-looking DNN website and how to customize it with CSS

• How to use DNN's built-in functions and modules to implement a complete professional, content-driven business website solution while providing the necessary core skills that will help you become proficient in your day-to-day usage of the framework

While the book does not explain every last detail of the DNN technology, it does concentrate on functionality that is found “under the surface” while walking you through many processes and details that will allow you to take advantage of the DNN framework.

From the Back Cover

DotNetNuke® Websites

Problem Design Solution

DotNetNuke (DNN) is a flexible, powerful, open-source framework supported by major web site hosts and boasting a rapidly growing community of ambitious developers. This valuable resource demonstrates how you can take advantage of the many terrific features of the DNN core framework as you design and implement your own professional, real-world DNN web site. Tracy Wittenkeller, President and Founder of one of the best-known DNN solution providers, walks you through a complete project from start to finish and guides you through the development of a modern, sophisticated DNN site.

The self-contained chapters first present a problem to be addressed then segue into an explanation of what is necessary to solve each problem. After you've established how to solve the problem, you'll use hands-on practices and code to execute the solution. In the end, you'll discover how to maximize the depth and power of DNN's core feature set and become more proficient in your every-day use of the frameworkand you may even be surprised by the ease at which professional-level functionality can be implemented with DNN.

What you will learn from this book

• Various problems you may encounter when building a DNN web siteand solutions for handling them

• Out-of-the-box techniques for DNN skin design and deployment

• Methods to make content implementation simple and consistent throughout your DNN web site

• How to take advantage of key core DNN functions and features and get more out of the Text/HTML, Media, Announcements, Links, Survey, and FAQ modules than you ever thought possible

Who this book is for

This book is for beginning-to-intermediate-level DNN users who want to create a great-looking DNN web site and use DNN's built-in functions to their fullest potential. The knowledge gained from this book will allow users to implement DNN web site solutions more efficiently and profitably than ever before.

"Tracy Wittenkeller's in-depth experience and product knowledge provide the reader with a killer combination of solutions for the DotNetNuke software platform as well as general content management principles."
—from the foreword by Shaun Walker, President/Chief Architect, DotNetNuke Corporation

Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; Pap/Onl edition (August 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470190647
• ISBN-13: 978-0470190647
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #489,551 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Somewhat average book, December 16, 2008

By	Ashleigh Grier "qt" (Oshkosh, WI USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In general most of this book is fluff, about 30-40 pages of actual useful information. Ok, first of all, the code editing in this book is awful. Much of the code is hard to read and the author uses tons of <table> rather than <div> which I know is a personal preference, but the general trend for the industry is to move away from tables so this was extremely irritating to have to read through all that considering this is a book for 2008. The author in several places was missing code whether it be CSS or XHTML to make the "demo" website look the way he got it to in the pictures in the book so you pretty much just have to troubleshoot your website if you can't get it to look the same. He also uses badly named classes and puts CSS rules in not-so-intuitive places like font styles and weight in a Background CSS class!?! Why would you put font and text styles in a background rather than colors or images? Bad practices all over the place. None of the XML really gets explained at all. Sometime uses camel case sometimes doesn't depending on what part you are working with so it makes the code hard to read through at a quick pace. My final complaint, much of the code doesn't even need to be there, as I said before there would be font and text styles in a background that would have a solid background color and the font-weight/text-style isn't even getting used. If it's not being used, don't put it in the code. There's lots of code in this book that is essentially useless due to that reason and should've been left out.

Now for the good parts. It essentially is a good book for a beginner learning Dot Net Nuke. Walks you through how to build your first Dot Net Nuke skin/container and upload it to the framework. Explains vaguely a few of the nuances of DNN. Average starter book, but not very well put together

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars useful project, useless book, February 26, 2009

By	Rolf Hendriks (Gaithersburg, MD) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

as a programmer, sometimes you will run into a piece of code like 'int x=0', followed by a comment like 'set x to 0'. this is an example of a useless comment, since it just parrots what the code does without explaining anything.

well, this entire book is a useless comment on the code presented in the book's project. it simply blows my mind how uncreative the explanations are, always just regurgitating all the minutiae of what is already apparent in the code without actually explaining any concepts, or shedding any light onto why things were written the way they were. i quit halfway through the book because i literally got angry at my book for being so narrow minded and unimaginative with its explanations. for example, the authors start by going into the details of how they set up their skins and containers, but don't really explain what skins and containers are, how they work, and how they relate to each other.

for a good example of the problem-design-solution idea done right, see asp.net website programming. here is an example of a book where the author has a near telepathic sense for what your biggest questions are about his code, and uses his space to explain how his solution satisfies usability issues, why it evolved the way it did, and how you might have been implemented differently under slightly different circumstances.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good non-programmer text, August 7, 2008

By	Hemlock "Over 40 Victim of Fate" (Naples, FL) - See all my reviews

I love the Wrox Problem-Design-Solution series because they take a basic problem, work through it and show the solution, showing you all the steps along the way. This formula works well for many readers because it's not theoretical, there's an actual task that needs to be accomplished. Even if the task isn't precisely what the reader is looking to accomplish, the process of working through the problem is understandable and easy to follow.

This book is no exception, and is one of the few DotNetNuke books that doesn't read like it was written by a programmer fascinated with the inner workings of the product. The only programming covered in this book is CSS, HTML and what is needed to flesh out the look and feel of a DotNetNuke web site.

One of the great aspects of the DotNetNuke framework is that a programmer can use that framework as a basis for creating a full-featured application set without having to work on the underbelly of the applications. The framework provides that. But there is an opposite side of the framework -- the vast number of DotNetNuke users, those who have no need to program new functionality beyond getting the site to "look right" and work. It is this latter group who are served by this book.

And served well. The book walks through creating the mbrdesigncorp.com web site, and each chapter builds the code needed by the site for that stage of development. This book devotes most of its ink to the basic setup, creating the look and feel and basic management of the site, with particular attention to making the site both visually pleasing and functional. You may never design a site that has the same needs as mbrdesigncorp.com, but the process the book moves through will be similar for almost every DotNetNuke web site you might design.

There are a few flaws with this book, the primary one being the same flaw held by most DotNetNuke books. By the time the book is published, there is a new version of DotNetNuke that makes at least some of the book obsolete. This book fares better in that the 4.8.x version of DotNetNuke is stable and will have minimal changes, but the 5.0 version of DotNetNuke was in beta 6 the day this book hit the shelves. In this book that flaw is mitigated by the fact that the design process will still hold true for DNN 5.0, even if the management screens change.

A second problem with this book is also common to many DotNetNuke tomes, in that there are so many possibilities with DotNetNuke that a single book can't cover them all. For example, while there are at least four well-supported menuing systems for DotNetNuke, this book covers only one, and minimally at that. This book also leaves out modules which aren't relevant to the design at hand, which is to be expected but which also lowers the book value if your needs don't exactly match the book. In fact, the Working with Modules chapter feels like it's been rehashed from other DotNetNuke books published over the years.

This book saves itself though by going beyond others with a very well written and easy to follow discussion of using CSS to manage the site's look and feel. Chapter 9 on security is another must-read, and Chapter 10: Tips, Tricks and Additional Resources is worth the price of admission.

Overall, this book is the best DotNetNuke book available for the non-programmer, and is written with the voice of a real user. That alone is refreshing in the world of DotNetNuke books. A bit pricey at the $[...] (US) cover price, definitley worth the Amazon discounted price or direct from Wrox.