Hello DNN gurus!

 I've got a question regarding the capabilities of DNN and if it can help me on this project. Basically, I've been tasked to allow 3rd party users to create their own website WITHIN our website. A bit like how you can have a outlet store within eBay - it's the users store but it's within ebay. Thinking about this stuff needed to perform this, we basically come up with a list which sounds like we'll be writing our own CMS (like workflow approval processes, versioning etc) - so why bother writing a custom CMS?

The question for me is, in a traditional CMS you give users access to be able to update content on a site which has had it's foundations (layout etc) already preconfigured. With my project, they want to be able to give the users complete control over the layout and the content, having a page editor (almost a Dreamweaver lite) where the user can drop controls onto the page and arrange it however they want. Yes, you can end up with shops which look totally different but thats whats been asked for (the rights and wrongs of this are a different argument).

Can DNN help in this respect? The web design team are going to produce the page editor but can we hook that into DNN to take some of the CMS duties off our backs? It seems silly having to write our own CMS - unless you know better?

 

Many thanks for reading,

Pete

Thanks for the reply Mark.

I've got a bit of a brain fuzz today - so we can develop this customer, drag & drop website editor, in house and plug it into DNN? Yes, a custom DNN module would seem like a good idea.

 Do you know of any good pre-done ones which I can use in a quick proof of concept? Also, for the workflow stuff - does it have to the Enterprise version as I'd like to play about with those functions without purchasing anything.

Cheers,

Pete

Pete,
As Mark stated, DNN support multi tenant at it's core. You can setup child portals mainsite.com/customerstore or parents customerstore.mainsite.com. The benefit for the parent portal is that you can steup a wildcard on your DNS so people can launch a site quickly as an alis..but then they can go back and add in their own domain name later.

Either way, each portal will have it's own users, security, etc protecting an admin on one store from accessing or changing things on another store. Additionally, DNN has modules and content panes (places where you can put things) built into the framework...it fact is used to have some drag and drop but I haven't seen that working for a while. I'd recommend you development team integrate to the existing module's concept to do things like drag a module from a list of available modules into a page.

Modules, skins (the look and feel) and host users (you) can be shared across all portals on a single DNN instance.

You can use "site templates" to preconfigure sites on creation.

There is a module designed to walk a user through a portal creation process. You can get it here (http://www.onyaktech.com/Products/tabid/65/CategoryID/0/List/1/catpagesize/0/Level/a/ProductID/21/Default.aspx?SortField=UnitCost+DESC,ProductName). It's $29 and is designed to wizard a user through the portal creation process, select a site, select a skin, setup their user, etc. It's meant for paid subscriptions for their site but also allows for things like trial periods, etc.

I used to run a multi-tenant solution on DNN that supported over 300 dealership in North America. It was a combination of core, purchased and custom modules but it worked really well. We did that using three separate DNN instances.

---

Steven Webster
Manager, Community Platform
F5 Networks, DevCentral