DotNetNuke® 5 User's Guide: Get Your Website Up and Running

Chapter 3. DotNetNuke Concepts and Host Configuration

Installing DNN is just the first step in setting up your website. Once you have your website loaded in a browser, it's time to look at the key concepts around the functionality that DNN provides. There are a number of common terms that we will define in more detail, and we will discuss how those items relate to the application as whole.

Once we have the concepts out of the way, we will jump into the Host Settings and other features provided to super users. We won't cover the process of administering content or users in this chapter; we will cover content administration aspects of DNN in Chapter 4, and target content maintenance in the remaining chapters of the book.

This chapter discusses the following topics:

• Common DNN terms and concepts

• Administrator and super user access

• The Host Settings

• Managing and installing extensions

Definitions

This section defines some of the key terms within DotNetNuke (DNN) in greater detail than in previous chapters. Knowing what these terms mean will help your understanding of how to build and administer a DNN website come together as we reference them throughout the rest of the book.

Portals

DNN provides the ability to host multiple websites on one installation, or instance, of the software. These individual websites are known as portals, so your DNN instance can have a single portal, or multiple portals, depending on your configuration. We will talk more about portals later in this chapter, as well as ...