DotNetNuke website project in Visual Studio 2012

Question

I created a basic DNN website and have the following question:

Is there a way to load the complete site, including all components into Visual Studio and basically run it as an ASP.NET project/solution? I am strictly not looking for a way to develop DNN modules in Visual Studio but I want to know whether I could pick up on a DNN site that was first developed through the browser interface and continue the project within Visual Studio within ASP.NET without any future reliance on development within a browser or WebMatrix making it essentially become a ASP.NET project.

I am in the process of deciding whether I should have a website developed in DNN or from scratch in ASP.NET and I just do not like to rely on business models that may turn from open source to proprietary tomorrow, also I prefer to have all fine-tuning done within a VS environment.

Sorry if this seems a basic question which possibly displays my lack of knowledge in web development, I have actually never coded a single line to create websites. So web development, particularly DNN is fairly new to me.

Answer 1

What you could do is download the DotNetNuke Source which includes the entire DotNetNuke Community project written in C# and then build the project yourself.

DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS

Answer 2

You can open the DotNetNuke source in Visual Studio. However, it is strongly suggested that you don't, so that you can enjoy hassle-free upgrades (were the business model to change, you could then be free to make whatever changes you need).

That said, when you're making changes through the browser, those will be mostly database changes, and won't be things that you can adjust through Visual Studio. They only exist as content that you access through the modules.

DNN does have the ability to edit the actual code of module controls through a DNN site which is running locally, but I don't think anyone would suggest that you use that for developing non-trivial extensions. To create extensions, you'll write code in Visual Studio (without making any changes to the core DNN code). You might use Christoc's DNN Module Templates are a starting point.

Answer 3

Freddy,

Since you have not mentioned what kind of solution you are planning to develop, it is difficult to suggest which one is best for you. Good way to determine this is to check if your solution has how many CMS related features.

Regarding Visual studio website project, currently dotnetnuke is source code and installation releases are available for visual studio 2010 solution only. But if you will open any of them in visual studio 2012, it will be automatically convert it.

DotNetNuke comes with lots of CMS features ready to use for free. Examples are authentication and permission, user management, role management, blog, forums, Ready for SEO etc. and much more. For more details, you can check dotnetnuke site video library, documentation etc.

Let me know if you have more questions.