Hello! I’m Carole Bennett, one of the MojoPortal Community Liasons for Arvixe.  Ian McIntosh has been doing a great job of showing you how to get an “out of the box” MojoPortal installation configured, so that you can explore all the great built-in features it has to offer.  Since he’s working that area, I’m going to start by going over how to set up a custom MojoPortal solution, suitable for custom development.

In today’s post, we’ll cover downloading source code, setting up a Visual Studio project environment, a MSSQL database, and how to set up the publish profile that will generate the actual website you’ll install on a live server.

Step 1: Download Source Code

You can download the source code associated with the latest release of MojoPortal at the Codeplex MojoPortal page. The change set contains a zip file of all the source code for the associated release. Download this to a folder on your local machine, and extract all the files.

Step 2: Create an Empty Web Application

Open Visual Studio 2010, and select File>New Project.  Select Visual C#, “ASP.Net” Empty Web Application”, and give it the name for your project.

Step 3: Prep the Project Folder

Once you’ve done that, navigate to the Project folder, and clear out any unneeded files.  It may seem roundabout, but it keeps all your projects organized in one area, and as you create more MojoPortal projects, that becomes a very important factor.

Step 4: Copy Source Code Into Project Folder

Copy all the files from the extracted source code folder into the Project folder.

Step 5: Change mojoportal.sln to Project Name

This is completely optional, but I always change the mojoportal.sln to the name of the project, to avoid confusion when working on multiple projects simultaneously.

Step 6: Open the Project in Visual Studio

Open Visual Studio back up, and select “File”>”Open Project” – navigate to the newly renamed .sln file, and open.

Step 7: Creating an Empty Database In MS SQL

Open SQL Server Management Studio to your local instance; right click on “Databases” and select “New Database”. I suggest giving it the same name as your MojoPortal project, to avoid confusion.

Step 8: Setting Up Connection String In Web.Config

Set up a connection string to the empty database you’ve just created in the web.config
If you’re the kind of person who forgets syntax, don’t sweat it – just go to http://www.connectionstrings.com/ and look it up.

Step 9: Creating Settings for Publishing

It’s handy to set up your publish profile at this point; I create a “File System” publish profile, so that I have a backup copy locally that I’ll use FileZilla to upload to my hosting provider.

In Part 2, we’ll pick up with the first “build” of MojoPortal, and we’ll start a custom UI template for our new client.  If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at carole.bennett@arvixe.com, and I’ll be more than happy to help you out in any way I can.  Thanks!

Looking for quality mojoPortal Hosting? Look no further than Arvixe Web Hosting.