Building Websites with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit

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/

TrixBox Made Easy

Credits

About the Authors

Introduction

Free Chapter

The ASP.NET Community Starter Kit

What Can the Community Starter Kit Do for You?

The License Agreement

Installing the Community Starter Kit

Summary

Touring a Community Starter Kit Website

Overview of the Community Starter Kit

The Main Page

Overview of the CSK Modules

Common Features in the CSK Modules

Creating and Using User Accounts

Summary

Creating and Administering Community Websites

Using the Community Administration Menu

Summary

Themes, Skins, and the Common Controls

Meeting Themes, Skins, and Styles

Creating Themes

The Community Starter Kit Custom Controls

Summary

Customizing your Website

Setting up a New Community

Preparing the Folder Structure and the Page Skin

Adding Information

Changing the Layout

Summary

The Community Starter Kit Core Architecture

The CSK Folder Structure and Configuration Files

Building Pages for the Client

Processing the Request in the Middle Tier

The Database Structure

Online CSK Resources

Summary

Inside a CSK Module

Database Layer

Module Classes

Skins and Styles

Summary

Creating a New Module

Module Design

Module Construction Blueprint

The Community_Faq Table

The Community_Faqs Stored Procedures

Initializing the FAQ Module

FAQ Components

FAQ WebControls

Content Classes

FAQ Page Content Skins

Module Styles

Putting It Together

Summary

Customization with User Controls

The Custom Module Section

Custom Web Boxes

Summary

Adding an RSS Feed

The RSS 2.0 Specification

Community RSS Design

HttpModule Changes and Configuration

CommunityRSS.aspx

Testing the RSS Feed

Advertising the RSS Feed

Summary

Deployment

Installing Content Files

Database Deployment

Community Starter Kit Configuration

Working with Other Sites

Summary

CSK Controls

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

The Community Starter Kit Custom Controls

We’ll take a look at the common custom controls in the CSK.

The secret of building a functional skin file lies in using the included CSK controls properly. You can find these custom controls under the Controls subfolders under the /Engine folder:

/Engine/Admin/Controls subfolder contains the controls used in the admin pages.
/Engine/Modules/module_name/Controls subfolder contains controls specific to particular modules. module_name can be one of the following: Articles, Books, Discuss, Downloads, Events, Links, ParentSection, or PhotoGallery. (There are two more folders that have no custom controls defined: CustomModules and HtmlPage).
/Engine/Framework/feature_name/Controls subfolder contains various controls specific to CSK features. The subfolders in Framework that contain custom controls are: Comments, ContentPages, Images, Moderation, Notify, Ratings, Controls, Services, Topics, Users, Voting, and WebBoxes.

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Building Websites with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit

Building Websites with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit

Overview of this book

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Building Websites with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit

The Community Starter Kit Custom Controls