One thing we have experimented with is to create a 'Portal Manager' role that has edit access to all the modules we want to allow them to change, but not to edit the pages or some of the modules we want locked in.  Then we give the user access to that role that would normally be in the 'Administrator' role, but don't make them an administrator.  This provides for a more locked down child portal.  We have found this to be nice because much of DNN is too complicated for some people.  Most of the time, when you are just churning out these child portals, the people using them don't need to customize what pages and modules they use if you setup the base template right, they just need to be able to modify content, which having edit rights to particular modules will allow.

Now, a couple issues with this include the following:

1.  Some of the modules under Admin are needed by the Portal Manager - There are many alternatives out there to replace these modules.  You can also change a setting in the DesktopModules table in the database for those modules and set IsAdmin=0.  This will enable any of those modules to be used on a page not in the Admin drop down.  We often create a 'Manage' tab that has all of the required administrative type pages under there.

2.  Emails sent out from 'administrator' account - The common account we assign as the administrator has a common email address.  Also, it is the modules that look at this setting and send out the emails.  Through the use of alternate 3rd party modules that let you set the email address, you can pretty much get rid of this problem.

3. Portal Registration requires you to enter an admin - We use one of our common accounts to serve as the administrator and we create the portals ourselves.

I have a video that covers this topic - it's called Modules - Want to learn more about how modules work? Then download this video to learn about installing modules, permissions, and some of the interesting features of DotNetNuke

You can access by registering at http://www.xd.com.au/home.xd

I have other videos for download also.

Nina Meiers

Admin Control Panel - - Go to host/settings and the choose the classic control panel I think - but sometimes this causes errors with skins that have the new control panel skinned in it.. but that is how you put the minimum one on.  If you don't want people to be able to make any changes, you have start setting permissions at module level so that no control panel appears.

I can only share my experiences with hosting since I have several, including Linux... yes I own linux box too.. so I'm not a systems admin person, but have had to wear DotNetNuke problems.

In my opinion, DNN is a big hungry on resources. If you run multiportals, off the same db - eg. .children, I'm not sure you can do application pooling since they are all on one instances, so you need to have your sql fine tuned I guess to manage the requests.

In reference to whether users require ftp access. No they don't. None of my clients have ftp access.  The manager works well for them, and the modules that are available for photo galleries and such really do make a difference in file uploads. Although I do tweak the web.config sometimes and think that there is a bit of site tweaking and management to make it run well.

I have my own thoughts on how servers should be run, but it's only  a personal one, and not qualified to put my opinion forward, since there are many more experienced hosters here who probably wouldn't agree, and it all depends on your own circumstances and needs to get these things setup correctly to suit your business model.

Nina Meiers