Professional DNN7: Open Source .NET CMS Platform

DNN Platform Overview

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding the basic concepts of the DNN Framework
• Introduction to DNN security

This chapter introduces you to some of the core concepts of the DNN Platform and provides an overview of how these fit together. Over the years, DNN has evolved and changed appearance considerably, but the overall structure has remained the same. What you have installed through the previous chapter is an extensible “web application framework.” You can use it to create all kinds of web-based applications. But to do so you need to understand some of its underpinning core concepts. And to complicate things a little bit, the terminology has evolved over the years as well. This means that some concepts have a different name in the UI than they have in code (and in SQL) purely because at one point it was decided that the old term was confusing or too “techie,” so it was dropped for something more easily understandable. Because this is a largely technical book, we will stick to the terms used in the DNN API, but we will note if they have another name in the UI.

CORE PLATFORM OBJECTS

In this section, the basic building blocks of DNN and how they fit together are examined from a technical perspective.

Sites (Portals)

DNN is a powerful engine for creating websites. That is websites, plural and not singular. One of DNN's core features is what is known ...