Multiple Applications on top of mojoPortal

Well, it’s been a while since my last post, but I thought I’d let you know some of the problems I ran into installing DotNetNuke and Joomla on my hosting provider, considering I have mojoPortal as my root site.

GoDaddy has this funky section of Hosted Applications, where you can simply select the application you want and it will install it for you! This includes setting up the database and the application.

So, I decided I would take a look at DotNetNuke and Joomla to compare it with mojoPortal, although I have already made my mind up, that mojoPortal is the best CMS, as it’s fast and very easy to use. Plus it’s written in C#, which is my language of choice, whilst Joomla is written in PHP and DotNetNuke is written in, wait for it… VB.NET, yuk!

So, the first thing I did was set up two net sub domains using the Domain Management tool in GoDaddy, I called them dotnetnuke.ptrsystems.com and joomla.ptrsystems.com and put them in a dotnetnuke and joomla directory, respectively.

I then popped into the Hosted Applications section and installed them into the appropriate sub domains. I shortly got an e-mail telling me they were both set up!

Great, I thought, and it was great for joomla, which worked straight away, especially as this is a PHP website, so doesn’t care much for the Web.config in the root directory! But, DotNetNukewas a different kettle of fish!

To start with, I got a nice Server Error 500! Which, on your own server, you could get a bit more information than just Error 500, but on GoDaddy’s hosting you don’t!

So, how to fix it! Good Question! I had a feeling that the Web.config in the root directory was propagating down to the dotnetnuke directory, therefore the sub application will be trying to find mojoPortal modules which are not in the dotnetnuke application’s directory.

So, I needed to stop this propagation, but how!? Trawling the Internet was proving quite difficult to find, even on the MSDN website, but I finally found a <location> tag option, which stops inheritance to child applications. This is the solution, but when I tried it, it then caused Application Errors, so I moved the <location> and </location> tags to stop inheritance on certain sections of the Web.config file, after lots of trial and error here’s where you need to put it:

...........
      </appSettings>
      <location path="" inheritInChildApplications="false">
            <system.web>
...........
            </system.codedom>
      </location>
      <runtime>
...........

So, basically you need to enclose all the tags in the <location> tag, except for:

  • <configSections>
  • <appSettings>
  • <runtime>

After this was done, both mojoPortal and DotNetNuke work excellent together, and I’m assuming any ASP.NET application I intend to host under mojoPortal will also work!

My next move is moodle! Unfortunately, GoDaddy believe this will only work on a Linux server so their Application Hosting section wont let me install it on my Windows hosting, but where there is a will, there’s a way, so I’ll let you know how that gets on next!

Until then, I’m busy living the last days of my 20s! So might be a while before my next post! Until then, take it easy and I hope this helps anyone that wishes to host applications under a mojoPortalparent site!

%d bloggers like this: