Hi everyone!

I have a few basic questions about dotnetnuke and its capabilities that I hope maybe somebody here can answer...

I would like a main grape growing portal, with a links directory, forums, classifieds, download directory, calendar, photo gallery, email accessibility and later online shopping.  I would also like to have a central listserver available to all the portals, but this is probably completely separate from dotnetnuke.

Now....for each state, for example I would like a separate or child portal with a homepage that has weather for that state, links to state-specific resources and chat.  (growers often want to chat only with growers from the same region).

-----------First question.....is the above possible with dotnetnuke?----------------

Secondly, there is supposed to be a points system that we can administer for a portal.  Does this keep a running total of both the parent portal and the children portals?....  My reason being that Thirdly I would like to be able to set up advertising at the main portal which would be visible to the children portals, but also leave ad space for the child portals to have region specific advertising as well.

A portion of the total advertising that all portals earn together could be distributed to portal users based on the amount of points they accumate.....am I crazy?

I guess I'll leave it at this for now....What I have is state specific yahoo grape growing groups which have members of up to 8 or 900 growers, many webpages about grapegrowing, articles, links, etc...

Rather than have all the links, posts, downloads, photos scattered all over the place at our yahoo groups and in the hands of yahoo, I would like to take that back and put it in the hands of the growers.....and distribute the advertising money to the users instead of giving it to yahoo.

Please tell me if this might be possible....or if you have any specific ideas of how to implement this.  I have been webmastering for about 12 years and been a grape grower for about 35 years now but never hosted on a windows platform.  I am familiar with Cgi script installation and basic website hosting but have yet to dig too deeply into any code.

Any help or encouragement would at least help,

Best regards, Michel White http://www.grapegrowersolutions.com

Michel,

Most of you want is possible using DNN albeit with some 3rd party modules. The biggest problems I see are with the cross portal sharing info. I don't think the core ads module will do the level of tracing that your are requesting but it should be a fairly simple module to rebuild. You will find the same to be true of the other modules because they are desinged to work in a hosted envronement where there might be other portals on the same host.

For this ambitious of a project however you should have the budget to get a couple of custom modules built that would serveryour purposes better than some of the stock stuff. I'd also consider whether you really need subportals or simply a domain redirector to the appropriate tab.