Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Converting a DotNetNuke site to Umbraco

I recently discovered Umbraco when I was looking for an alternative to DotNetNuke. After playing around with it for a couple of evenings, I decided to convert a site running on DotNetNuke 2.1.2 on a Access database to Umbraco. The first steps I took to get to know Umbraco were :

  1. Install Umbraco as described here
  2. Install the Creative Web Specialist Website package and see how it works
  3. Googled for some XSLT tutorials to brush up my knowledge on it, because Umbraco is extensible through XSLT macro's
  4. Installed a clean Umbraco instance and tried out the screencasts found here.
The following things will have to be done to convert the site :
  1. Create a template for the site
  2. Create a guestbook package using a .NET usercontrol to post messages
  3. Import the guestbook messages from the old site.
  4. Create a news package with archive using a ActionHandler save the news items in a correct subfolder similar to the blog package
  5. Create a picture gallery package using SWFUpload for uploading pictures
  6. Create events package
  7. Create a members section using the MemberControls
  8. Maybe more that I can't think of now
Some extra things I want to do is :
  1. Test the MySQL support recently created by Ruben Verborgh
  2. Create a Data Layer for MS Access or another DB. This is mostly a learning project for the Umbraco source.
I'll keep updating this blog with my progress. Cheers ! Dave

2 comments:

SQueek said...

I recently took the same trip :-)
Before I used DNN, but got repeatedl annoyed, that DNN cluttered the design trough the ControlPanel and that content editing and design was coupled to strong. Umbraco makes fun to use and explore..
Thanks for your nice explanations of how to use umbraco. Will follow your tracks.. ;-)
Greets Mario

Anonymous said...

Why do you call DNN as a portal system? Why doesn't it qualify to be a CMS?
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