Professional DotNetNuke 5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) [Paperback]

Shaun Walker (Author), Brian Scarbeau (Author), Darrell Hardy (Author), Stan Schultes (Author), Ryan Morgan (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0470438703 | ISBN-13: 978-0470438701 | Publication Date: February 24, 2009 | Edition: 1

DotNetNuke creator Shaun Walker leads this superlative author team of MVPs while delivering the latest update of a bestseller. They offer complete coverage of the major revisions to DotNetNuke 5, such as more granular administration, widgets, XHTML compliance, improved social networking, workflow, and better content management. They thoroughly cover installing, configuring, administering, and developing modules for DotNetNuke. You?ll learn portal and host administration, configuration in a hosted environment, developing and working with modules, designing a DotNetNuke portal with skins, integrating workflow in DotNetNuke, using DotNetNuke social networking tools, and much more.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

DotNetNuke is a powerful open source framework for creating and deploying web sites with dynamic and interactive content. Written by the creator of DotNetNuke and a team of DotNetNuke community experts and ASP.NET programmers, this book provides you with the tools and insight you need to install, configure, and develop web applications with DotNetNuke 5.

After Shaun Walker's introduction to DotNetNuke and the business aspects of creating and nurturing the DotNetNuke community, product, and a new DotNetNuke corporation, the authors demonstrate how to manage and administer a DotNetNuke portal. They then show you how the application works through the DotNetNuke application architecture and its major application programming interfaces (APIs), which provide DotNetNuke's power.

You'll discover how to extend the portal framework by developing and distributing modules that plug into a DotNetNuke portal, and you'll examine the flexible skinning capabilities of DotNetNuke. This helpful exploration of the history, structure, and foundation of the DotNetNuke application affirms its place as an extremely extensible application framework.

What you will learn from this book

• The latest features and functionality of DotNetNuke 5 and the differences between DotNetNuke Community Edition and Professional Edition

• The responsibilities of a host/administrator who is using DotNetNuke as a web portal, such as the uploading of skins and modules

• The core modules that are included with DotNetNuke and how to use them

• Ways to integrate DotNetNuke into an existing membership structure

• Techniques for replacing hard-coded text with dynamic strings

• The new unified model for packaging extensions for distribution

Who this book is for

This book is for nondevelopers who are interested in exploring the DotNetNuke framework as well as experienced ASP.NET developers who want to build dynamic ASP.NET sites or create add-ins to DotNetNuke.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

Product Details

• Paperback: 600 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; 1 edition (February 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470438703
• ISBN-13: 978-0470438701
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #562,426 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great introduction to DNN, March 9, 2009

By 

L. Barlow - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional DotNetNuke 5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

Summary: Was this book a help to me? Yup. I would highly recommend it if starting development on any kind of custom DNN project (or any kind of DNN work in general). I pretty much agree with everything the previous reviewer said.

I didnt have this book when I was asked to create a DNN site with some custom content at work. I'd had no previous experience with DNN, but am an ASP.net developer with other portal app experience so was able to set up my dev DNN site pretty easily. I do wish I'd had a chance to glance over the chapters on intro/setup before doing so just because there are a few options that aren't quite intuitive. I also noticed a lot of questions asked in the forums are answered here.

The first chapter went into some background of DNN - very enjoyable for a technical book. I'm glad the authors didn't choose to put this as a foreword or I probably would have skipped over it. Reading how such an extensible open-source application came into existence is really neat. It also tells you about the decisions made along the way and why they were made.

After the intro, installation, and admin-type content, the book goes into more detail about the application design, the different provider models, APIs, etc. I really liked how the authors started out describing the chain of events that occur within the application when a web request is made (like how the friendly URLs are processed, for example). All of these more technical chapters are very clearly written and provide sufficient detail and examples.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Too much fluff, not enough useful information, February 7, 2011

By 

Scott Wilson (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional DotNetNuke 5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

There is too much padding, and not enough overview, in this book.

As someone else mentioned in more detail, the start of the book is padded with largely irrelevant anecdotes about the history of dotnetnuke. Unfortunately, once you get into the meat of the book, it doesn't get any more useful. The most obvious steps are laboriously described (how to unzip a file) and the most obscure (creating a module with multiple views) are skipped over lightly with the apparent assumption that the reader is already familiar with the topic.

Specific examples, as is often the case in Wrox books, are given around a sample project; however, in the tasks described, it is rarely made clear what steps are taken exclusively in support of the specific sample case and which are the general steps necessary for any project.

The code listings in the book are lengthy but are not commented sufficiently to be useful.

Much is made of the fact that the authors are significant contributors to the DNN project, but that is actually a recommendation against the book when you consider that the help integral to the product itself is similarly poorly written... click the question mark tag next to "Module Culture" and you get the tautological "The culture for this module" instead of anything genuinely helpful. The entire book seems to follow this general premise that throwing a greater volume of words is sufficient explanation for concepts, as if the reader already knew everything the authors do but simply needed to have their memory jogged. As a tool for learning the concepts of developing for DNN, it's not particularly helpful.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars DNN Rocks, March 2, 2009

By 

Shawn Weisfeld "C# MVP" (Dallas TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional DotNetNuke 5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

A few weeks ago I got a copy of Professional DotNetNuke 5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET. Figured since I had been to presentations by 3 of the 5 authors I just had to have the book. Brian Scarbeau, Stan Schultes and Ryan Morgan are avid speakers in the Florida .NET community and knowing them I knew this book was going to be a good read. A cross country flight from Dallas Texas to Seattle Washington provided the perfect opportunity to concentrate on reading a new book.

While waiting for my plane to take off I made it through the first chapter of the book written by the father of DotNetNuke Shaun Walker. This chapter talks about the history of where DNN came from and trials and tribulations that Shaun and his team had giving birth to what we know today. I think that anyone that is interested in starting an open source product should spend a few minutes and learn from the lessons that Shaun learned in the creation of DNN, especially if you are trying to build an open source product that sits on the very not open source Windows platform.

The next few chapters of the book provide information on just about everything that administrator/end-user would need to know in order to go from an empty hosting account to having a DNN site. This includes installation, an overview of the modules and how to administer the lot. The next chunk of the book talks about the architecture of DNN. For years I have been telling developers looking for reference architectures to look at products like DNN. This set of chapters not only includes information on how the DNN team did what they did, but perhaps more importantly WHY they did it that way. For me knowing the why behind these types of decisions allows me to leverage the lessons learned by other developers and apply that to my applications, even non-DNN applications. The ability to learn from the experience/knowledge/mistakes of others makes us all better developers. The last chunk of the book is the how to information that you need to extend DNN. They cover modules, skinning, and distribution.

This book provides a good overview of all the major components in the DNN products. It covers the architecture of the DNN infrastructure and how to extend it with your own custom modules and skins. This book provides the developer and the administrator what they need to get their feet wet with DNN, and as an added bonus you get a great narrative on the birth of an open source software package.

Shawn Weisfed C# MVP
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