DotNetNuke Demo Walkthrough
Ryan Morgan - www.ArrowDesigns.com

Hello and welcome to the DotNetNuke demo. This walkthrough will first give step-by-step instructions on setting up your DotNetNuke demo site and then take a high-level look at some of the features that are available through the DotNetNuke.

Setting Up Your Demo DotNetNuke Portal

First go navigate to the DotNetNuke demo site. You can get there by clicking the following link: demo.dotnetnuke.com or by the button on the main DotNetNuke site (www.dotnetnuke.com), look for the Online Demo button in the middle of your screen (see illustration).

Next, click the link that says Create Your Demo Account.

You should now be at a form that you will fill out to create your DotNetNuke demo website. The form should be relatively self-explanatory, but there are a couple of “gotchas” so we’ll walk through each field.

1. Website Name: this is the address of your demo site. For my example, I want my portal to go to demo.dotnetnuke.com/DNNWalkThrough, so I would only enter the last part – DNNWalkThrough.
   
2. Title: this is the title that your website will use for automated emails and the automatically created Terms of Use. For mine, I will enter DotNetNuke Walkthrough.
   
3. Description: in this and the next field, we will set the default Meta Tag values for our website. If you are not familiar with what this is, don’t worry – just put in a short one-two sentence describing your website. For mine, I will enter
   DNNWalkthrough is an online demonstration of the features and abilities of the DotNetNuke CMS.
   
4. Keywords: we should list 7-10 keywords about our website. Some search engines use these to index your content. For mine I will enter DotNetNuke, CMS, DNN, ArrowNuke, ASP.NET
   
5. Template: choose the single option available. This field tells DNN how to set up your portal website.
   
6. First Name: in mine I put Ryan
   
7. Last Name: in mine I put Morgan
   
8. Username: in mine I put RyanMorganArrowNuke
   
9. Password: in mine I put my password – please be sure to enter at least 7 characters with one non-numeric. For the non-geeks and those not paying attention, that means you need to enter a character that is not a number or a letter (!@#$$%%^).
   
10. Email: since this is the site administrator email, you may want to use a generic email address at your organization. DotNetNuke uses this email to send out all new user creation, role update and automated emails from the site. For mine I put NoReply@ArrowNuke.com.
    
11. Lastly – click the Create Website link (see illustration).

Labs written and created by Ryan Morgan of ArrowNuke.com - Custom Modules, Skins and Training