Book Image

Building Websites with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit

Book Image

Building Websites with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit

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

The Main Page


The main page in the Lunar .NET community contains the elements expected of any community website: a logo, a menu with links to various sections, an advertising banner, and so on. In this chapter we learn how the built-in functionality works, and inChapter 3 we’ll learn how to administer it through the Community Administration Menu.

Bear in mind that it’s possible to completely change the layout of a CSK website by building new skins (as we’ll learn inChapter 4) or using the predefined themes that ship with the CSK.

Note

You can preview the predefined themes at http://localhost/CommunityStarterKit/Admin/help/theme.htm.

The Community Logo

The community logo appears in the upper left part of the site. It can be changed by editing the logo of the home page in the Community Administration Menu.

The Community Menu

The community menu is just below the logo, and contains links to the sections of your community. Each section in the community has a content type, such as Books, Links, or...