This posting is a complete step by step guide for installing DotNetNuke on your local machine using SQL Server Express and running on Windows 2000/XP. This article guides you through the creation of the needed database, user account, virtual directory, and configuration changes to successfully setup DNN 4.4.1. I will be posting a document for installation using Windows Vista and IIS 7 if there is enough demand.

This post provides a step by step instruction to properly configure the DotNetNuke forums module to allow all registered users to post. This article was written to end some confusion regarding the standard DotNetNuke settings and functionality. Please see the entire entry for detail.

One configuration setting that seems to be overlooked frequently with ASP.NET 2.0’s membership provider is the applicationName setting.  This setting is very important if you ever want to move your application from one server to another or if you want to share users between multiple ASP.NET applications.

With ASP.NET membership provider stores all user information associated to a specific “Application Id” this application id is created based on the name of the application.  This allows one ASP.NET membership database to support multiple web applications with multiple sets of user identities.  If you omit the applicationName setting the ASP.NET runtime assigns a specific value for the application based on the current installation location/system.  If the application was moved to a different server this value would change.  Therefore, this value should really be set for each application!

One benefit of this setting is the ease of use to share user accounts between applications.  If you set the applicationName to the same value for multiple applications their membership providers will pull from the same user database allowing the users to use their same login credentials for both applications.  For more information on membership in ASP.NET 2.0 please see this MSDN Article http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/yh26yfzy.aspx.