We have received a lot of feedback during the past couple of days since the newest release of MonoX was made public. Users are focusing on various types of functionality: personalization, localization, extensibility, interfacing with third-party tools, ... However, one type of question is very common: "tell me how to develop my custom solution on top of MonoX". There are multiple usage scenarios, depending on your goals and development experience, so here are just a few advices:
- we are now including a sample project that includes all neccessary references and folder structure, allowing you to jump start a custom project by adding a few pages and Web parts using Visual Studio, compiling it, and having a working portal in minutes. More complex projects will always be started this way. You can find the sample project in the "/MonoX/Samples/Solution".
- MonoX has a preconfigured asp.net 4.0 web.config that needs to be used when you are installing the MonoX on the .net 4.0 platform. It is recommended to use this web.config before you start the MonoX installation (Note: you need to give the worker process account a write permission on the web.config to automatically setup the web application, otherwise you need to do it manually). If you are upgrading an existing MonoX based application then first sync the web.config files, copy the .net 4.0 enabled web.config to the application root and then change the '<add key="InstallationDone" value="false"/>' to '<add key="InstallationDone" value="true"/>'.The web.config file can be obtained from this location "MonoX/Samples/Solution/web4.0.config".
- if you are not a seasoned developer you may want to check the Web part catalog and interactive mechanism of adding pages to your site. Log in as admin, go to the backend administrative interface by clicking on "Go to the portal administration area" in the toolbar that is located at top of each page. Choose Page manager and right click in the page list on that screen. This will allow you to pick "Create new page", which in turn displays a list of all available templates, folders and security roles for the page you are going to create. You may want to double click on the newly created page to see how it looks, and than select "Part catalog" in the administrative toolbar. This allows you to select any of our Web parts and place it in the appropriate area of the page. Each part can be configured by clicking on the "Properties" in the Web part menu.
Please check out our user manual for more details on Web parts and Web part manager zones.