Building

You’ve run into this issue numerous times. You are developing an ASP.NET application, and you need to incorporate functionality that comes prepackaged in SharePoint. Wikis, blogs, document management, user authentication, access management—common needs across a variety of solutions. You know there is a way to integrate SharePoint's functionality within ASP.NET solutions, but you don’t know how to develop it.

Without guidance and examples, interacting with underlying SharePoint components can be challenging, and working with the different SharePoint APIs is complicated. This book introduces you to a variety of techniques to master the art of developing ASP.NET applications that are built upon a SharePoint foundation. You’ll explore integration with SharePoint components, configuration management, Code Access Security, feature packaging, proper use of SharePoint APIs, and advanced deployment techniques. Pro ASP.NET SharePoint 2010 Solutions walks you through all of the steps needed to successfully build and deploy ASP.NET solutions within the SharePoint platform.

What you’ll learn

• How to use SharePoint as a development platform
• How to build SharePoint features such as authentication, document management, and wikis and blogs into an ASP.NET application
• How to migrate an existing application from ASP.NET into SharePoint
• Understand the SharePoint / .NET / IIS implementation
• Different approaches to packaging ASP.NET within SharePoint

Who this book is for

This book is for ASP.NET developers who want to incorporate the functionality of SharePoint into their applications. Readers familiar with either ASP.NET development or with SharePoint will find valuable information which will greatly enhance their solutions and allow them to build solid, professional applications with minimal effort.

“Even if you’re already a seasoned Drupal user of CCK, Views, or Panels, I’ve no doubt that this book will provide you with several new techniques and methods for getting the most out of these extremely essential modules. It certainly has for me.”

—Dries Buytaert, founder and project lead of Drupal, and CTO of Acquia 

With Drupal, Web professionals can create full-featured Web sites with just a few clicks. Drupal’s core is compact and well documented, but much of Drupal’s immense power lies elsewhere—in external modules. Drupal’s Building Blocks is an authoritative tutorial, reference, and cookbook for Drupal’s most valuable modules.

The authors are Drupal insiders who’ve spent years creating and supporting these modules—Earl Miles, developer of the Views and Panels modules, and Lynette Miles, Drupal documentation team member. They’ve brought together indispensable information you won’t find anywhere else, as well as extensive sample “recipe” code designed for easy adaptation and reuse. Learn how to

• Use Content Construction Kit (CCK) to customize your data input forms around your needs
• Improve site flexibility with Drupal’s node system
• Add optional field types, including PHP-based fields
• Customize themes to display data more attractively and legibly
• Build powerful Views query displays
• Integrate with SQL databases
• Customize Views with relationships, arguments, and filters
• Optimize query performance
• Add custom styles with the Panels module
• Maintain full control over sites as you deploy into production

This book will help you create more powerful, flexible, usable, and manageable Web sites—whether you’re a Web developer, designer, administrator, architect, or consultant.

The accompanying Web site contains all examples, code, and themes presented in this book.

Having your own blog isn’t just for the nerdy anymore. Today, it seems everyone—from multinational corporations to a neighbor up the street—has a blog. They all have one, in part, because the folks at WordPress make it easy to have one. But to actually build a good blog—to create a blog people want to read—takes thought, planning, and some effort. From picking a theme and using tags to choosing widgets and building a community, creating your blog really starts after you’ve set it up.

In Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read by blogger extraordinaire Scott McNulty, you’ll learn how to:

• Install and get your WordPress site running.
• Set up your site to ensure it can easily grow with you and your readers.
• Be the master of user accounts.
• Manage your site with the WordPress Dashboard and extend its capabilities with plug-ins.
• Make the most of images.
• Work with pages, templates, and links and—of course—publish your posts.
• Use custom post types and taxonomies to bend WordPress to your will.
• Deal with comments—if you even want readers commenting at all.
• Find a theme and make it your own.

Praise for Previous Edition of Joomla!: A User’s Guide

“A complete guide to the powerful features of Joomla! 1.5, this book takes a holistic approach to building a Joomla!-powered website–from the CMS itself to its many extensions, search engine optimization, and even building your own tableless template. The novice reader is eased into the subject and confidently guided through the basic principles and on to the more advanced features. This guide empowers the user not only to build a professional website but to also to make it a success.”

–Russell Walker, CEO, Netshine Software Limited (Joomla! Development Consultancy)

“If you’ve been using or following Joomla! in the past years, you’ve most likely seen the name Barrie North or Joomlashack. Barrie has been a member of the community for a long time and, as such, my expectations for this book were pretty high. Besides explaining how Joomla! works from a usability point of view, there is valuable information for people who want to learn serious template building, and readers can stand out of the crowd by using Barrie’s steps to make their (X)HTML and CSS optimized for accessibility and SEO. All in all, this book is a great guide that comes at the right time for newcomers and more experienced Joomla! users and developers alike. Well done, Barrie!”

–Arno Zijlstra, Joomla! cofounder, custom template specialist, www.alvaana.com

“In a time when solid, real-life Joomla! 1.5 information is rarely available, this book is a thirst-quenching oasis of knowledge. The abundant and clear examples in the book make Joomla! 1.5 websites within anyone’s reach. I heartily recommend Joomla! 1.5: A User’s Guide by Barrie North.”

–Tom Canavan, author of Dodging the Bullets: A Disaster Preparation Guide for Joomla! Based Web Sites

“Refreshing! After reading many how-to books, this one is a step beyond the rest because of its focus on examples based on live sites. This book is well crafted for beginners to advanced users with a well-organized overview that walks you through the entire Joomla! CMS.”

–Steven Pignataro, corePHP, www.corephp.com

“As a long-time Joomla! end-user and developer, I had low expectations for anything new I might learn from this book. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find it a great refresher course, especially since the book is logically organized, leading beginners from the most basic Joomla! concepts and continuing through to more complex ones, such as tableless template design and how to write a template for Joomla! 1.5. In summary, Barrie North has produced the gold-standard print reference for Joomla! 1.5. I highly recommend this book for novice and intermediate users if you want to make the most of Joomla!”

–Vicor Drover, http://dev.anything-digital.com

The Best Easy-to-Use Guide to Joomla!™−The World’s #1 Open Source Content Management System

If you want to build sophisticated websites that can be easily edited and updated, you need to master Joomla. Now there’s an easy-to-read, easy-to-use guide to Joomla for every site manager, administrator, and developer. Leading Joomla consultant Barrie North covers all you need to get results: installation, administration, site organization, template development, content updates, and a whole lot more. You’ll find tips, tricks, and troubleshooting solutions, as well as three start-to-finish case studies.

New to Joomla? No problem! This book starts with the simplest design and system concepts, and builds your expertise step-by-step. You’ll rapidly master Joomla’s power, even if you have no content management, scripting, or CSS expertise. Experienced with Joomla? You’ll turn to this book constantly for its authoritative, plain-English, example-rich Joomla 1.6 reference content.

•    Understand content management, what Joomla does, and how its components fit together

•    Build Joomla sites from scratch and systematically customize them to your needs

•    Create modern, pure CSS Joomla 1.6 templates using popular grid frameworks

•    Use Joomla 1.6’s nested categories to organize content and articles

•    Create dynamic pages and effective navigation

•    Work with Joomla modules and components

•    Learn how to optimize your Joomla sites for search engines

•    Follow three start-to-finish case studies: building a school website, a small business site, and a blog

•    Identify the most valuable Joomla extensions and add-ons: find them and use them

Many Flex books cover the basics—this book does something different, and goes far further. The authors, leading Flash platform developers at Almer/Blank, working with Adobe User Group communities, are the creators of the Rich Media Exchange (RMX), a social media network for Adobe developers. In covering just how the RMX was built, this book contains all the knowledge you need to build similar large-scale Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex. From the inception of the idea through to deployment, the authors show the techniques needed to plan and build advanced applications. You'll learn how to use forms, styles, validators, video, sound analysis, and framework caching, ensuring you make the most of the new features introduced in Flex 3. Powerful applications require solid back ends. This book shows how to hook up a Flex application to PHP back-end systems such as Drupal and OpenAds. You'll learn how various parts of the RMX were built, including the blogs, event calendar, jobs board, and advertising system—elements that come together to really showcase the power of Flex. The RMX is built by Adobe Developers for Adobe Developers—a rewarding community relationship that guarantees results. The same spirit is carried into this book, with the authors wanting and helping to take you to the next level of Flash Platform application development.

In this book you'll learn how to

• Effectively plan, wireframe, specify, develop, and release large-scale Flex applications, and discover what other development tools you'll want to start using immediately
• Make your Flex applications look less like Flex with advanced styling and skinning techniques
• Harness advanced Flex form features, including coding validators and building your custom form components
• Implement a robust advertising system for a Flex application using OpenAds
• Build powerful, custom multimedia players in Flex, including video players with the native VideoDisplay class and from scratch, and music players with advanced sound visualization

Summary of Contents

• PART 1 PLANNING THE RMX
  • Chapter 1 Introduction to Flex 2 Applications
  • Chapter 2 Defining the Application: Introducing the RMX
  • Chapter 3 Planning the Application: Building the RMX
• PART 2 BUILDING THE RMX CORE FUNCTIONS
  • Chapter 4 Preparing to Get to Work
  • Chapter 5 Styling Flex
  • Chapter 6 Collecting and Working with Aggregated Content
  • Chapter 7 Secondary Navigation
  • Chapter 8 Forms and Validation
  • Chapter 9 User Communications
  • Chapter 10 Working with Video
  • Chapter 11 Advertising and Flex
• PART 3 BUILDING OUT NEW FEATURES
  • Chapter 12 Building the Blog
  • Chapter 13 Building the Jobs Board
  • Chapter 14 Building the Event Calendar
  • Chapter 15 Ideas for the Future: Extending the RMX
• PART 4 SPECIAL TOPICS
  • Chapter 16 RSLs and Persistent Framework Caching
  • Chapter 17 Search Engine Optimization for Flex
  • Chapter 18 Building an Audio Visualizer in Flex
  • Appendix The Evolving Flex Scene

In Detail

Joomla! started as a fork from Mambo in 2005, when many of the original developers of the Mambo CMS moved to working on Joomla! It has rapidly grown in popularity and, according to its own description, is a "Cutting Edge Content Management System and one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management systems in the world. It is used world-wide for anything from simple homepages to complicated corporate websites. It is easy to install, easy to manage and very reliable."

While the Joomla! CMS has the flexibility and power needed for complex, full-featured web applications, it is also simple to use to create basic websites. Its powerful, extensible template system can deal many different data types and control of user access, approval of content, scheduling of content display, and rich administrative controls are all included.

Approach

This book takes the reader through the tasks essential to create a Joomla! website as rapidly as possible. The necessary tasks are explained with clear step-by-step instructions. The author's chatty and engaging style makes this book very readable.

Who this book is written for?

This book is suitable for web developers, designers, webmasters, content editors, and marketing professionals who want to develop a website in a simple and straightforward process. It does not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development, and any IT-confident individual will be able to use the book to produce an impressive website.

Many Flex books cover the basics—this book does something different, and goes far further. The authors, leading Flash platform developers at Almer/Blank, working with Adobe User Group communities, are the creators of the Rich Media Exchange (RMX), a social media network for Adobe developers. In covering just how the RMX was built, this book contains all the knowledge you need to build similar large-scale Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex. From the inception of the idea through to deployment, the authors show the techniques needed to plan and build advanced applications. You'll learn how to use forms, styles, validators, video, sound analysis, and framework caching, ensuring you make the most of the new features introduced in Flex 3. Powerful applications require solid back ends. This book shows how to hook up a Flex application to PHP back-end systems such as Drupal and OpenAds. You'll learn how various parts of the RMX were built, including the blogs, event calendar, jobs board, and advertising system—elements that come together to really showcase the power of Flex. The RMX is built by Adobe Developers for Adobe Developers—a rewarding community relationship that guarantees results. The same spirit is carried into this book, with the authors wanting and helping to take you to the next level of Flash Platform application development.

In this book you'll learn how to

• Effectively plan, wireframe, specify, develop, and release large-scale Flex applications, and discover what other development tools you'll want to start using immediately
• Make your Flex applications look less like Flex with advanced styling and skinning techniques
• Harness advanced Flex form features, including coding validators and building your custom form components
• Implement a robust advertising system for a Flex application using OpenAds
• Build powerful, custom multimedia players in Flex, including video players with the native VideoDisplay class and from scratch, and music players with advanced sound visualization

Summary of Contents

• PART 1 PLANNING THE RMX
  • Chapter 1 Introduction to Flex 2 Applications
  • Chapter 2 Defining the Application: Introducing the RMX
  • Chapter 3 Planning the Application: Building the RMX
• PART 2 BUILDING THE RMX CORE FUNCTIONS
  • Chapter 4 Preparing to Get to Work
  • Chapter 5 Styling Flex
  • Chapter 6 Collecting and Working with Aggregated Content
  • Chapter 7 Secondary Navigation
  • Chapter 8 Forms and Validation
  • Chapter 9 User Communications
  • Chapter 10 Working with Video
  • Chapter 11 Advertising and Flex
• PART 3 BUILDING OUT NEW FEATURES
  • Chapter 12 Building the Blog
  • Chapter 13 Building the Jobs Board
  • Chapter 14 Building the Event Calendar
  • Chapter 15 Ideas for the Future: Extending the RMX
• PART 4 SPECIAL TOPICS
  • Chapter 16 RSLs and Persistent Framework Caching
  • Chapter 17 Search Engine Optimization for Flex
  • Chapter 18 Building an Audio Visualizer in Flex
  • Appendix The Evolving Flex Scene

In Detail

Joomla! started as a fork from Mambo in 2005, when many of the original developers of the Mambo CMS moved to working on Joomla! It has rapidly grown in popularity and, according to its own description, is a "Cutting Edge Content Management System and one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management systems in the world. It is used world-wide for anything from simple homepages to complicated corporate websites. It is easy to install, easy to manage and very reliable."

While the Joomla! CMS has the flexibility and power needed for complex, full-featured web applications, it is also simple to use to create basic websites. Its powerful, extensible template system can deal many different data types and control of user access, approval of content, scheduling of content display, and rich administrative controls are all included.

Approach

This book takes the reader through the tasks essential to create a Joomla! website as rapidly as possible. The necessary tasks are explained with clear step-by-step instructions. The author's chatty and engaging style makes this book very readable.

Who this book is written for?

This book is suitable for web developers, designers, webmasters, content editors, and marketing professionals who want to develop a website in a simple and straightforward process. It does not require any detailed knowledge of programming or web development, and any IT-confident individual will be able to use the book to produce an impressive website.

Praise for Previous Edition of Joomla!: A User’s Guide

“A complete guide to the powerful features of Joomla! 1.5, this book takes a holistic approach to building a Joomla!-powered website–from the CMS itself to its many extensions, search engine optimization, and even building your own tableless template. The novice reader is eased into the subject and confidently guided through the basic principles and on to the more advanced features. This guide empowers the user not only to build a professional website but to also to make it a success.”

–Russell Walker, CEO, Netshine Software Limited (Joomla! Development Consultancy)

“If you’ve been using or following Joomla! in the past years, you’ve most likely seen the name Barrie North or Joomlashack. Barrie has been a member of the community for a long time and, as such, my expectations for this book were pretty high. Besides explaining how Joomla! works from a usability point of view, there is valuable information for people who want to learn serious template building, and readers can stand out of the crowd by using Barrie’s steps to make their (X)HTML and CSS optimized for accessibility and SEO. All in all, this book is a great guide that comes at the right time for newcomers and more experienced Joomla! users and developers alike. Well done, Barrie!”

–Arno Zijlstra, Joomla! cofounder, custom template specialist, www.alvaana.com

“In a time when solid, real-life Joomla! 1.5 information is rarely available, this book is a thirst-quenching oasis of knowledge. The abundant and clear examples in the book make Joomla! 1.5 websites within anyone’s reach. I heartily recommend Joomla! 1.5: A User’s Guide by Barrie North.”

–Tom Canavan, author of Dodging the Bullets: A Disaster Preparation Guide for Joomla! Based Web Sites

“Refreshing! After reading many how-to books, this one is a step beyond the rest because of its focus on examples based on live sites. This book is well crafted for beginners to advanced users with a well-organized overview that walks you through the entire Joomla! CMS.”

–Steven Pignataro, corePHP, www.corephp.com

“As a long-time Joomla! end-user and developer, I had low expectations for anything new I might learn from this book. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find it a great refresher course, especially since the book is logically organized, leading beginners from the most basic Joomla! concepts and continuing through to more complex ones, such as tableless template design and how to write a template for Joomla! 1.5. In summary, Barrie North has produced the gold-standard print reference for Joomla! 1.5. I highly recommend this book for novice and intermediate users if you want to make the most of Joomla!”

–Vicor Drover, http://dev.anything-digital.com

The Best Easy-to-Use Guide to Joomla!™−The World’s #1 Open Source Content Management System

If you want to build sophisticated websites that can be easily edited and updated, you need to master Joomla. Now there’s an easy-to-read, easy-to-use guide to Joomla for every site manager, administrator, and developer. Leading Joomla consultant Barrie North covers all you need to get results: installation, administration, site organization, template development, content updates, and a whole lot more. You’ll find tips, tricks, and troubleshooting solutions, as well as three start-to-finish case studies.

New to Joomla? No problem! This book starts with the simplest design and system concepts, and builds your expertise step-by-step. You’ll rapidly master Joomla’s power, even if you have no content management, scripting, or CSS expertise. Experienced with Joomla? You’ll turn to this book constantly for its authoritative, plain-English, example-rich Joomla 1.6 reference content.

•    Understand content management, what Joomla does, and how its components fit together

•    Build Joomla sites from scratch and systematically customize them to your needs

•    Create modern, pure CSS Joomla 1.6 templates using popular grid frameworks

•    Use Joomla 1.6’s nested categories to organize content and articles

•    Create dynamic pages and effective navigation

•    Work with Joomla modules and components

•    Learn how to optimize your Joomla sites for search engines

•    Follow three start-to-finish case studies: building a school website, a small business site, and a blog

•    Identify the most valuable Joomla extensions and add-ons: find them and use them