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/

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Building Websites with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit
May, 2004 | 284 pages
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Table of Contents (16 chapters)
TrixBox Made Easy
TrixBox Made Easy
Credits
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
Introduction
Introduction
Free Chapter
1
The ASP.NET Community Starter Kit
The ASP.NET Community Starter Kit
What Can the Community Starter Kit Do for You?
The License Agreement
Installing the Community Starter Kit
Summary
2
Touring a Community Starter Kit Website
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
3
Creating and Administering Community Websites
Creating and Administering Community Websites
Using the Community Administration Menu
Summary
4
Themes, Skins, and the Common Controls
Themes, Skins, and the Common Controls
Meeting Themes, Skins, and Styles
Creating Themes
The Community Starter Kit Custom Controls
Summary
5
Customizing your Website
Customizing your Website
Setting up a New Community
Preparing the Folder Structure and the Page Skin
Adding Information
Changing the Layout
Summary
6
The Community Starter Kit Core Architecture
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
7
Inside a CSK Module
Inside a CSK Module
Database Layer
Module Classes
Skins and Styles
Summary
8
Creating a New Module
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
9
Customization with User Controls
Customization with User Controls
The Custom Module Section
Custom Web Boxes
Summary
10
Adding an RSS Feed
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
11
Deployment
Deployment
Installing Content Files
Database Deployment
Community Starter Kit Configuration
Working with Other Sites
Summary
CSK Controls
CSK Controls

Processing the Request in the Middle Tier

The functionality in communityDefault.aspx is based on a large number of classes from the CSK engine. We met some of these classes earlier, and now it’s time to have a closer look at them. Bear in mind that we won’t attempt to look at each of them in this chapter (this would probably be, if not impossible, at least inefficient)—but we’ll focus on the most important ones, giving you the knowledge you need to build your own CSK modules and features. Then, in the following chapters, we’ll apply this knowledge by implementing custom functionality in the CSK.

We can easily access the list of classes that compose the CSK by using the Class View window in Visual Studio .NET. All the CSK classes are located under the ASPNET.StarterKit.Communities namespace and each content module adds another namespace suffix to its classes:

Because these classes are arranged in a clear structure under the Engine folder, we’ll use their physical location as a base for analyzing...

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