Book Image

Building Websites with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit

1 (1)
Book Image

Building Websites with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit

1 (1)

Overview of this book

Microsoft's ASP.NET Community Starter Kit (CSK) is a powerful, freely available application that allows you to quickly create a fully featured community-driven website, complete with article and news management, downloads, forums, and user handling. Supported and tested by thousands of developers in the ASP.NET community across the world, the Community Starter Kit offers you the luxury of a scalable and extensible architecture, and the ability to brand your own site. This book will take you inside the Community Starter Kit, allowing you to harness its power for easily creating your own websites. The book is structured to help you understand, implement and extend the Community Starter Kit: Understand how the Community Starter Kit works. Build the skills to implement your own site. Develop the confidence to extend the system for your own needs. With this book, you will learn how to: Install and configure the CSK Find your way around the CSKs towering range of features Create and administer community websites Become familiar with the common CSK ASP.NET controls Customize your CSK site Discover the secrets of the CSK core architecture Explore the inner workings of CSK modules Extend the CSK by creating new modules Customize existing modules with Web controls Add an RSS feed to share your content with others Deploy your CSK website This book is for ASP.NET developers with a sound grasp of C# and access to Visual Studio .NET. This book uses the Visual Studio. NET version of the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit available from http://www.asp.net/StarterKits/
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
TrixBox Made Easy
Credits
About the Authors
Introduction
CSK Controls

Chapter 3. Creating and Administering Community Websites

At first glance, a web page consists of colors, layout, and data. When dynamically building the requested page for a visitor, the CSK engine imports these elements from external sources. You can easily change (or create) what the visitor sees by altering these external sources and without recompiling the project. The CSK stores the colors (and styles) in external Cascading Style Sheets, and the layout is managed by skin files (you’ll learn about these inChapter 4 .)

This chapter will teach you how to administer the data displayed by the CSK. We will specifically talk about:

  • Using the Community Administration Menu to manage your community

  • Managing global community data and working with multiple communities on a single CSK installation by using the ISP Admin pages

Using the Community Administration Menu

The CSK is equipped with a powerful administrative interface named the Community Administration Menu. It is an excellent tool that allows...