Melon, Inc. Melon Components Starter Kit

Transcription

1 User s Guide for Melon Components Starter Kit For additional information Contact us at info@meloncomponents.com 2010 All rights reserved

2 Contents Overview... 3 Melon Components Starter Kit Usage... 3 Installation Prerequisites... 3 Starter Kit Template Installation... 4 Connect to Database... 5 Website functionality... 5 Front End... 6 Top menu... 6 Melon Components front-end interfaces... 6 Back End... 8 CMS... 9 Product Catalog... 9 News...10

3 Overview Melon Components Starter Kit is a self-installing website for Microsoft Visual Studio with the following Melon Components integrated in it: - Content Management System - News - Forum - Product Catalog The website is fully functional and allows users to authorize and authenticate, administrate and browse components, customize the user interface. Melon Components Starter Kit Usage The Starter Kit allows developers to create a fully functional Website project which can be further modified and customized depending on the specific needs. The Website will work with no limitations under domain, and will require licenses only when deployed to test or production server with Intranet or Internet domain name. Developers can get a free one month license, by downloading any of the Melon Components from the website or receive a full license by purchasing one or more of the components. After obtaining the lincese key for any of the components, developers can simply place it in the <melon.components> section in the web.config file of the Website created with the Melon Components Starter Kit. Installation Prerequisites To install Melon Components Starter Kit, users need to have Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2010 installed, ASP.NET 3.5 Framework and SQL Server Express Edition 2005 or 2008 to run the website shipped with the starter kit. Note: If users want to use other versions of SQL Server (2005 or 2008) they need to attach manually the database file WebsiteDB.mdf found in the App_Data folder of the project and change the connection string in the web.config of the project.

4 Starter Kit Template Installation In order to load the website in Visual Studio, users should install the website template in their Visual Studio. Follow these steps to install the Melon Components Starter Kit in Visual Studio: 1. Start Melon Components Starter Kit.vsi file 2. Follow the steps in the wizard to install the project template. At the end of the installation process the installed template represents a.zip file which usually resides in %UserProfile%\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates folder 3. Start Visual Studio and open the New Website screen File -> New Website. The installed starter kit is located in My Templates section

5 4. Select Melon Components Starter Kit template from My Templates section and follow the wizard to create a new website Connect to Database Before starting the website developer needs to connect to the database. The Starter Kit comes with a sample database which resides in App_Data folder. Developers can attach that database file to any SQL Server (2005 or 2008) or use the Microsoft SQL Express server which can be downloaded for free. In order to change the SQL Server parameters users need to modify the connection string. The default connection which comes with the Starter Kit is set in the following connection string: <connectionstrings> <remove name="localsqlserver" /> <add name="localsqlserver" connectionstring="data Source=.\sqlexpress; Integrated Security=True; User Instance=True;AttachDBFilename= DataDirectory WEBSITEDB.MDF; " providername="system.data.sqlclient" /> </connectionstrings> where WEBSITEDB.MDF is the database file located in App_Data folder of the website. Website functionality Melon Components Starter Kit ships with the four Melon Components CMS, News, Forum and Product Catalog. These components consist of both back-end and front-end interfaces.

6 Website back-end functionality provides administration panel where website administrators can configure what components should display to users, while front-end interfaces display that information to customers. Front End The interfaces users can browse in the front-end consist of the following parts: - Top menu for navigating between components - Login and Create Account screens to authorize users - Melon Components front-end interfaces customers can browse components information by selecting the desired component from the top menu Top menu Users can browse components by selecting them from the top menu. The menu is created by the CMS component itself and navigates to CMS-created pages or other components interfaces. Melon Components front-end interfaces These components can be accessed by selecting the respective menu item from the top menu. Menu items Home, About and Contacts contain CMS-created pages while the other menu items open component front-end interfaces. Forum front end main page

7 News component front-end main page

8 Product Catalog front-end main page Back End Users can login into the administration panel after opening the login screen by clicking on the Login link in the upper right corner of the front-end. In order to open the administration panel users have to click on Go to Admin panel link located next to the Login link. If users are not authorized yet in the website, they are automatically redirected to Login screen. The Starter Kit comes with a predefined admin user with the following credentials: username: admin password: password This user has administration rights for all components back-end interfaces. All component administration panels are located in the back-end except Forum component. It has both front-end and back-end in one and the same place. Administration panel consist of a top

9 menu each menu item navigates to the back end of the respective component, and a center panel where components` back-end interfaces are visualized. After clicking on a menu item components default screen opens. CMS For the CMS component the default screen is a welcome page with a tree-view hierarchy of CMS pages and a menu to navigate through sections CMS Explorer, Templates and Users. Each of these sections provides functionality to manage different aspects of the CMS component. Product Catalog The default page for the Product Catalog component is the Category listing page. It holds the category hierarchy listed in the left panel and the category details in the center panel which are populated after selecting a category item from the left menu. This component also has a menu to navigate to the other administration sections of the component.

10 News When selecting the News component from the top menu in the Administration panel a news listing page is visualized (see the picture below). This component provides navigation menu too. Users can manage news categories, comments posted by users and administrate user rights.