DotNetNuke is a widely adopted open source platform for building web sites and web applications with a Content Management System build on .NET. WebMatrix is a free tool that allows you to create, customize, and publish webpages. It gives a number of different ways that you can create websites. One of the features is providing existing open sources applications such as DotNetNuke, as well as WordPress, Joomla, DotNetNuke or Umbraco. In this tutorial, you will see how quick and easy it is to get your DotNetNuke application up and running! And show how to install, configure and publish a DotNetNuke application with WebMatrix.
If you do not already have WebMatrix, it can be downloaded for free at www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix.
When you launch WebMatrix you will see several options on how to create a new application. To create a DotNetNuke application, select “App Gallery.”

We will now choose the “DotNetNuke Community Edition” icon to install the application. You can give your application a name or keep the default name.

You will be prompted to select a database. Select “SQL Server” and make sure the “Windows Integrated Authentication” radio button is selected and click Next.

You will be prompted to install DotNetNuke. To do this you must click the “I Accept” button.

Now we wait while DotNetNuke is installed. This make take up to a couple minutes.

Once the installation is complete we will get a confirmation.

Clicking the “OK” button will take us to our WebMatrix workspace with the DotNetNuke application loaded.

To configure our DotNetNuke application, we will use the Installation Wizard. To run our installation wizard, click the “Run” button on the Menu Ribbon. Note: make sure you run the root folder of the application. Running our application will open the DotNetNuke Installation Wizard. Here we will have three different options for installation: custom, typical and auto. For this article, we will use the typical installation.

To successfully install our DotNetNuke application, we must first pass a permissions check. The installation wizard will notify you if you passed the check or not.

After we pass the permissions check, we must enter our database information. In this example we’ll use a SQL Server 2005/2008 (Express) File.

Once the database connection is created, the installation wizard will install the database for you. The installation of the database can take quite a few minutes.

Once the database installation is complete, a confirmation message will appear at the bottom of the window. The “next” button will once again be enabled. We must click “next” in order to continue with the installation wizard.
We now will have to create a Host account. Fill in the form and hit the “next” button. It is a good idea to write this information down.

Once your installation is complete you will be able to access your portal and log in.

In order to customize our application, we now need to login to our site as an admin. You should have been automatically logged in when your site was created. Once you are logged in as an admin you will have access to more features that allow you to customize your page. A tool bar will be present at the top of the screen.
We can add a new page to our site by adding the required information of name, what template, and where to insert the page to our application.
Mouse over the Pages link at the top and click the “Add” link which will show us a form where we can fill out information about our page.

After filling out the information, select “Add Page” so that we are directed to where we can add content to the page. Do so by clicking on the “Edit Content” link. This will cause an edit box to appear where you can add text and images with styling options that code the HTML for you (if you are in the “design” tab).

Once we are done customizing our site, we can publish our application. There are several companies that are offering free WebMatrix hosting. You can find this information under the Publish icon on the ribbon or by clicking the link on your WebMatrix workspace.

And We created our DotNetNuke application.