CommunityServer to DotNetNuke Part 2, DotNetNuke Installation

A couple of weeks ago I started off this series, I didn’t intend for it to take this long to get to Part 2, but I’ve had a lot of other things going on.

A brief background: I had a number of websites running on CommunityServer 2.1, I decided it was finally time to ditch CommunityServer due to the change in their licensing model and pricing that made it not good for the small guy. This series of blog posts is about how to convert your CommunityServer based sites to DotNetNuke.

Previous Posts: 
Part 1: An Introduction 
Part 2: DotNetNuke Installation 
Part 3: Converting users from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke 
Part 4: Getting the conversion tables ready for CS  to DNN 
Part 5: Moving Forum threads from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke
Part 6, Community Server to DotNetNuke Moving Forum replies and attachments
Part 7: CommunityServer to DotNetNuke handling URLs

This is Part 2, Installing and Configuring DotNetNuke

The installation of DotNetNuke for this conversion process is pretty straight forward. I started with a fresh install of DotNetNuke 5.6.0, though I would recommend you use DotNetNuke version 5.6.1 as of this blog post. You can grab the latest INSTALL package from the DotNetNuke Downloads page (I don’t recommend using the Web Platform Installer at this point in time)

You could probably try to do this conversion with an existing DotNetNuke website, but I found that I was moving from CS entirely to DNN, so I didn’t already have a DotNetNuke site to worry about. Part of the conversion process is going to reset some passwords, if you want to run this on an existing site you likely will want to rework that portion of the scripts (discussed in a future post).

I won’t provide you the entire steps for installing DotNetNuke, they are covered in the Wiki, but I will provide you with a few items of note.

  1. Install DotNetNuke using a licensed version of SQL Server 2005 or 2008, not SQL Express
  2. When you configure the connection string portion of the installation wizard do not use an OBJECTQUALIFIER (leave it blank)
  3. Leave the DATABASEOWNER setting as DBO, do not change it.

After you have DotNetNuke installed you should do the following

  1. Login as Host
  2. Go to the Host/Extensions page
  3. Go to the Actions menu and choose Install Available Extensions
  4. Select (check) the Forum module (I used version 5.0.0, I would recommend starting at that version) and install
  5. Go to the Home page
  6. Create a new page called Forums (or whatever you want to name it)
  7. Place the Forum module on the page
  8. Go to the Admin interface for the Forum module
  9. Delete any Groups or Forums that exist
  10. Go to the Module Settings for the Forum module
  11. Make note of the MODULEID in the URL, you will need this later

That’s about it, at least for now. This will get you a clean DotNetNuke install with the Forum module on it. In the next blog post we’ll start talking about the database scripts (located at http://cstodnn.codeplex.com)

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