DotNetNuke Websites

DotNetNuke websites are extremely flexible and versatile. They can be formatted to look like practically any other website you have seen on the Internet today. To get started on your journey to editing your own pages you need to start by understanding a few simple DotNetNuke concepts: Pages, Panes, Modules and Containers.

Pages

The basic building block of a DotNetNuke website is the page. Pages provide a place to display the content of your website. For example, most websites have a "Contact Us" page to display the contact information for the site owners. Pages are as wide as your monitor or more and can be as long as needed. With this much display space, it becomes convenient to divide the page into sections called panes.

Panes

Panes are named divisions of the page. They provide a way to place content on a page in particular places. See the image below. Panes are typically created with HTML tables and cells. As such, panes can usually adjust their size to the requirements of the content that is put inside them and can also be influenced by the amount of content in the panes around them. In other words, Panes help hold content relative to other panes, but can also change their size and shape if necessary.

Modules

Now that the pages are divided into panes, we can put modules into those panes do some great things with our page. Modules are blocks of creative website programming that can display content in special ways. For example, a calendar that can be used to schedule events, a blog page, or simple text and photos. There are a fairly large number of basic modules built right in to the DotNetNuke framework. A person could easily never need anything beyond those modules. Those that do find a more advanced need for a module will find that there is a living, thriving community of programmers scampering to make useful modules for DotNetNuke websites. Here are just a few of the basic modules.

Containers

Containers are all about presentation. When we put a module into a pane, it gets put into a container first, and then is shown on the page. The container provides background color, borders and a title to the module's content. It dresses up the content much like we can get dressed up ourselves. The same text and pictures can look very different inside a one container as compared to another. Containers can be changed easily. It would be very normal to see several different containers holding module content on the same page. They can really dress it up. Here is an example of the same content in three different containers.

Getting Started

The basic instructions for getting your content on the website are

1. Make a new page
2. Put a module in the correct pane
3. Add your content to the module.
4. Optional: Choose its container for display formatting. *
   
   *If you skip this step, the module will be displayed in a default container chosen for all the modules in the website.