What Can the Community Starter Kit Do for You?
The CSK helps you to create and administer online community websites by providing the complete source code for a carefully tested, scalable, and modular structure that can be reused and customized to suit your particular needs.
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Community websites are websites that support online communities. These can be regional user communities, developer resource sites, news sites, or other kinds of user‑group sites. Most community websites provide features such as presenting news and events concerning the community, photo galleries, links to other websites, discussion forums, and so on.
The CSK application itself is quite complex but can save you many hours of design and development efforts. It is built using powerful and flexible 3-tier architecture with reusable components and offers good performance. We’ll discuss the details of the architecture starting withChapter 6, but an example of its modularity is that the application, excluding the administration pages, has only two ASPX web forms. Each client page is dynamically built using separate web user controls and data gathered from the SQL Server database.
By default, the CSK comes with out-of-the box functionality that includes support for nine types of content including articles, books, events, photo galleries, downloads, user polls, and more. It also supports features such as moderation, upload quotas, comments, user polls, ratings, newsletters, advertisements, web services, and security. We’ll take a detailed look at each of these in Chapters 2 and 3.
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To see how these features work, you can preview the Lunar .NET community (the sample community that ships with the CSK) at http://www.asp.net/CommunityStarterKit/.
The CSK has built-in functionality for skinnable interfaces, which means you can change its appearance entirely through its administration interface and configuration files without modifying a single line of code.
An advantage of using the CSK is that a number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) support automatic deployment of websites that are based on it. We’ll talk more about deployment techniques and strategies inChapter 11.
