Creating a DNN Parent Portal
Posted by Tom on Friday, May 25, 2007 to DotNetNuke, DNN Tips and Tricks
This post was inspired by a question in the dotnetnuke.com forums and continues our “DNN for Beginners” series.
I am new to DNN and I am looking for instructions on installing one portal per domain name. These portals are independent of each other. I want them to use the same SQL Server database and use the same DNN code base (the same Dlls).
The ability to run multiple websites from one DNN installation has been touted by many as the number one feature over the years (especially in DNN’s infancy), even though I beg to differ. That’s food for another post though.
DNN allows you set up a second website or portal on your install as a “parent” or “child” portal. The only real difference is that parent portals have a unique domain name, whereas child portals run off of parent portals such as mysite.com/childportal.
To get back to the above question, here is how to create a parent portal. Login as SuperUser and navigate to Host | Portals. Here you’ll see a list of all portals running on this DNN install. From the action menu choose Add New Portal.
“Parent” is checked by default as the Portal Type, so no need to change that. Next, enter the domain name the new site will live on into the Portal Alias field such as my-new-site.com. A word of caution. When it comes to parent portals, the “my-new-site.com” domain name must already point correctly to your DNN install, otherwise the parent portal creation will fail. Most hosting providers support multiple domains pointing to a single IIS website at no additional cost.
The Title, Description and Keywords fields are optional at this point. You can always enter these once the new portal is up and running. You do have to choose an install template though. For this discussion let’s go with the default DotNetNuke template. I’m currently working on a post that will shed some more light on DNN install templates and how to create your own.
Up next are the Security Settings. Pay attention in this section, because the user you specify here will be the initial administrator for the new portal. Once that’s done, click “Create Portal” and if everything goes well, a “fresh” DNN portal will appear. First thing you should do is log in with the admin account you just created. After logging in successfully, you can safely assume that your new parent portal is alive and well.
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