Beginning Web Portal Development...

I've kicked around the idea of Web Portal development for the past 5 years. In the early days, I used DotNetNuke (DNN) to deploy an interesting portal that allow selected users to add and manage content on the portal. The guests that access the web site see what the administrators want them to see.

DNN has continually evolved over the years and upgrading to new releases can be extremely difficult. I haven't touched the site for at least 3 years because it ain't broke, so why screw with it? Lately, I've had some thoughts about what can be done with it, but I don't have the enthusiasm to muddle through everything it would take to make DNN do what I want.

I recently picked up, and started reading Omar AL Zabir's book, 'Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5'. There is some pretty cool stuff going on with Omar's Web Portal. Some of it I like, and some of it I don't really agree with. But that depends on what you want to accomplish with the Web Portal. I'm looking for something that will be easy to turn over to special administrators that will put the content together in a meaningful way, while the ultimate consumer of the site sees what they are supposed to see.

Omar's version allows things like adding widgets (content), dragging and dropping them around on the page, changing settings, removing widgets, adding pages (tabs), and other neat things. I see this as a really cool feature for the admin's to do their job, but I'm not sold on turning it loose to the general user. It works great for the population that Omar's addressing, but my thoughts are for a different group of users.

I'm not looking for the Portal to be the spot where everyone wants to start their day with. I am looking to accomplish providing a site that can be managed easily and provide a meaningful experience to both types of users.

So, with all that said, what am I looking to do and what am I looking to do it with?

As I said, the features Omar describes look like the things I'd like to provide to my admin's. I just don't want to give the end user the same privileges. So I'm going to use the things described in Omar's book and make some changes to them to meet my needs of allowing for different permissions to different users. I also have another agenda, and that is to start using the new technologies of Linq and WorkFlow.

This effort is going to result in a series of posts that will follow what I'm attempting to do.

I hope you'll stay tuned and I welcome your comments.

Otherwise it'll be a way for me to document what the hell I've done.