Installing DNN

First of all you need DotNetNuke latest sources. Go to DotNetNuke Downloads, get the last published package and save on your local machine.

Here we have the first choice: do you want to put DNN under your wwwroot folder or on another one? There's no need to have DNN under wwwroot, you can install it wherever you want. I use to have a folder where I create all my local DNN installs, let's say c:\dnnweb (I use this folder as my wwwroot for all DNN related stuff). As an example I will use training for my virtual directory, so my local dnn installation would end up being accessible by http://localhost/training.

1. Create a new folder: training
2. Unzip downloaded package into this folder
3. Read training\Documentation\Readme.txt for detailed instructions on file permissions. If you set the permissions on the parent folder (c:\dnnweb) before creating any file under it, all permissions will propagate to child folders and files and you'll never have to worry about it.
4. Create a new web application on this folder, either through IIS Manager or going to folder properties "Web Sharing" tab. Give a name (training) to the new Virtual Directory, this will be the path to access you portal (in our case http://localhost/training). I recommend using the same name as in the folder name just to keep things in order.

If you ever want to install another instance of DotNetNuke repeat these steps changing the names of the folder and the Virtual Directory. This is a good way of maintaining separate projects and separate development/deployment instances of DotNetNuke. If you're developing a number of modules for a specific purpose it's often better to isolate them from other unrelated modules you could have. Using this approach you can develop modules on different solutions/websites/portals.

The default DotNetNuke Visual Studio.NET Solution file is setup to look at http://localhost/DotNetNuke so if your local instance of DNN is other than this one you should modify this two files:

• DotNetNuke.sln: replace http://localhost/DotNetNuke/DotNetNuke.vbproj with http://localhost/<YOURVIRTUALDIRECTORY>/DotNetNuke.vbproj
• DotNetNuke.vbproj.webinfo: do the same change here

So lets edit these two files so they both have:

• http://localhost/training/DotNetNuke.vbproj

Again if you are working with multiple copies of DotNetNuke all solutions will be named equal (DotNetNuke.sln). I suggest you to change this to the name of the Virtual Directory where it is installed. Otherwise, you'll see in the start page of VS.NET a couple of DotNetNuke projects. It's very easy to open a project instead of another and make some changes in the wrong place. The solution file for this project will be renamed to Training.sln.