To develop modules for DotNetNuke you must first have a DotNetNuke installation running on the computer on which you intend to develop them. Setting up your development environment can vary based on what your end goal is. If you are doing module development for your own use, and within your own DNN environments, you can ignore a few of the settings below. If you are doing module development with the idea that you might turn around and give the modules away, or sell them, then you will likely want to follow the guidelines set forth below to support the widest array of DNN installation environments.

I recommend that each developer have their own local development environment, with a local IIS website running DotNetNuke, and a SQL Server 2008/2012 (not express, though you can use it) database for the website. Having an individual development environment makes group module development far easier than if you share environments/databases.

The steps for setting up your development environment will apply to both the Community and Professional editions of DotNetNuke.

Installation Configuration

Once you have the version selection out of the way you can go through the installation process. While I’m not going to walk you through the minutest of details of each step of installing DotNetNuke in this post, I will at least try to point you in the right direction for each step. Download the INSTALL package of the version of DotNetNuke you want to use in your development environment. Extract the files in the INSTALL package to a location of your choosing, this location is where you will point IIS (the web server) when we can configure the website. In my environment I typically use c:\web\dnnme.com\ (One item of note: you may need to right click on the ZIP file and choose Properties before extracting, on the properties window if you have an UNBLOCK option, click that. Some versions of Windows have started blocking files within the DotNetNuke ZIP files, which will cause you problems later during the actual install.)

Setup IIS

IIS is the web server that comes with Windows computers. DNN 7 requires IIS 7 or later (7,7.5,8.0), so you will need at least Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012. In IIS you should create a new website (Note: If you use an existing website in IIS be sure to add the HOST binding for DNNME.COM), and point to the folder where you extracted the INSTALL package.

Note: With DotNetNuke 7.0+, .NET Framework 4.0 is required, so be sure that your application pool is configured to run under 4.0, and not 2.0.
Set File Permissions

Setting up the file permissions for your DNN install is often the step that causes the most trouble. You should right click on the FOLDER in which you extracted DNN (c:\web\dnnme.com\) and choose properties. Choose the Security tab. You need to add permissions for the account in which your website's application pool is running under. You will want to setup the permissions to give the account Full or Modify permissions for the DNNME.COM folder. Which account you will use will vary based on your version of IIS, here’s a simple list of some of the default accounts based on the version of IIS.

• IIS Version Operating System Account
• IIS 7 Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 localmachine\Network Service
• IIS 7.5 Windows 2008 R2, Windows 7 IIS AppPool\APPPOOLNAME
• IIS 8 Windows 2012, Windows 8 IIS AppPool\APPPOOLNAME

Note: If you are using IIS7.5/8.0 you’ll notice in the above table that we have APPPOOLNAME in the identity, this is because when you setup a new website in IIS a new application pool is created. In place of you should type in the name of the application pool that was created. You can also bypass this and configure your application pool to use the Network Service account instead of a dynamic account if you would like.

Database Configuration

In SQL Server you should go through and create a new database. I always create a database with the same name as the website, so in this case DNNME.COM. Once you have created the database, create a user that can access that database. I always use SQL authentication, turn off the enforce password requirements, and give the user DB Owner and Public access to the DNNME.COM database. Remember the username and password you create here as you will need them when you walk through the Installation screen for DotNetNuke.

DotNetNuke Installation Screen

Populate the installation screen with the standard DNN information, Host username, password, etc. For the Database option, choose Custom and configure your database connection, providing the Server IP/Name, the Database name (dnndev.me). For the database authentication you'll want to choose the option that allows you to enter the username/password for the database user that you created previously.
Now there are two additional options you can configure, normally I would tell you not to modify these, but from a development environment perspective I do recommend that you change the objectQualifier setting. It should be blank by default, you should type in “dnn” (without quotes), this will prepend “dnn_” to all of the objects that get created by DNN such as Tables and Stored Procedures. This is not something I recommend from a production stand point, but if you are developing modules for sale, then supporting objectQualifier in your development is recommended. It will save you time down the road if you have a customer who has an objectQualifier defined on their production databases.

EVS is useful to all extension developers, Including vendors who sell products through the DNN Store, a consultant, or corporate developers and includes capabilities suited to the type of extension being created. The service helps to Ensure compatibility and quality of extensions with the different DNN platforms available today. Users of the Enterprise, Professional and Community editions can also leverage the EVS free of charge and have the ability to upload any number of extensions for testing or re-testing. Users will see results displayed immediately, adding to the value and simplicity of the service. For future reference, results can also be downloaded or emailed to the user in three separate file formats Including CVS, XLS, and XML.

When you first go to the site you will see the following screen :

From here the process is quite simple , select your file and upload DotNetNuke installer . The system will then go through and review all of the items that are outlined in Nathan 's post that I linked above . The final results will look similar to the following , ( I removed the package name for confidentiality ) .

From here you can see that any errors are listed , as well as warnings on if you are missing any critical parts of the manifest , for example the " Minimum Version " which is something I've Mentioned in previous posts is important is one of the key items . If you are distributing extensions to an audience I would recommend that you use this service prior to sending out any package , as it will help you the make sure that your extensions will work the best in all Situations .

DotNetNuke has many SEO features, but some are less obvious to the casual administrator. These SEO features, however, can have a dramatic effect on how your DNN website is indexed by Google, Bing and others, and as such, can have an effect on your page rank and search results.

Here are a few DNN tips and tricks to help in your DNN’s SEO:

1. Site Map Priority
Buried within your page settings is a feature that allows you to set indexing priorities to your DNN pages. To get there (once logged in as an administrator), go to “page settings”, then “advanced settings”, then at the bottom of the window, go to “other settings”.

Here you will find the item: “Site Map Priority”. The default for this is .5. However, if your page is the home page, or perhaps a landing page, you will want to up the number to 1.0, or .9 (1.0 being the highest). This will increase the perceived importance of the page by search engines such as Google. Where is this relevant? When your organization appears in a Google search, high priority pages may be presented as sub-links to the home page more frequently. This can be critical in immediately directing visitors to key pages in an organic search result.

2. Site Settings
Here we’ll talk about one of things NOT to do when it comes to SEO in DotNetNuke. In the “site settings” of DotNetNuke, administrators have the ability to enter descriptions and keywords. By doing that, those items will then be placed in the META tags for EVERY page on the DNN website. For SEO, this is an extreme no-no, as it will confuse the search engines and reduce the relevancy and page rank of your overall DNN website. It may be an easy way to get keywords throughout your site… but it will definitely hurt you in the long run!

3. Page Titles
One of the nice features about DotNetNuke is its ability to add dashes between spaced words in your page title. For example, if you title a page “DNN SEO Tips”, DNN will title the actual URL as “DNN-SEO-Tips”. This ensures that the individual words in the title will be relevant to Google.
Some administrators like to use underscores between words. For example: “DNN_SEO_Tips”. This is strongly discouraged as Google will index the entire string as one item. This means people searching for DNN, or SEO or Tips will not see your site on Google. They would only find you if they specifically put “DNN SEO Tips”. In some cases this may be a good thing, if your content is very niche-oriented. But if you’re looking to gather visitors based on more broad searches, using underscores will hurt you.

4. Robots.txt
OK, this one gets a bit technical for the casual DotNetNuke administrator, but robots.txt is an important factor when comes to SEO, so what we’ll do in this section is give you enough information that you can intelligently go to your IT person or your hosting provider to ask questions.

In short, the robots.txt function (which not accessible via the administration tools in DNN), tells various search engines such as Google what pages to index and what pages they should not. Pretty important! But, if your DNN website is with a host provider and you are operating on a shared instance (one installation of DNN with many portals), you may be operating on one, centralized robots.txt file, which may be configured to tell the robots to ignore all pages on your site!

There is a way to take control and get around this, but it takes someone with access to the server and a bit of IT knowledge. But, don’t let that stop you from finding out if your robots.txt file is configured properly.

Ask your IT or host provider:
Is your DNN website on a shared instance?
Do you have an individual robots.txt file for your specific DNN website?

That’s it a few simple tools and information on how to squeeze more effectiveness with your DotNetNuke’s SEO. Hope useful.

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WebDeploy v3.5 is now available and there are a few features to consider in this minor release:

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3. App Offline Template.
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6. Seamless integration with the Web Platform Installer to install community web applications simply and easily.
7. Web application packaging and deployment.
8. Web server migration and synchronization.
9. Automatic backup of Web Sites before making any changes.
10. In addition to the IIS Manager, Visual Studio 10, Web Matrix tasks can be performed using the command-line, PowerShell  Cmdlets or public APIs.

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