DotNetNuke® 5 User's Guide: Get Your Website Up and Running

Chapter 1. Introduction To DotNetNuke

The first web pages were created in the early 1990s, and since then managing the content of those web pages has been key to the acceptance and expansion of the World Wide Web. In the early days, this information was not managed in a specialized editor, as it was later in the 1990s, but by the web browser itself.

As the web expanded, this editing functionality became more restrictive, limited only to the owners of a web page or server. Early web pages were limited to text-based content, and the editors were rudimentary as well, providing simple text entry formatted with the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) syntax. HTML is the syntax used to code a web page, and web browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, parse the code to display content.

A lot has changed in the nearly 20 years since the first pages launched. Every person on the Internet has the ability to create and manage his or her own web page, or a collection of pages forming a website. The tools used to manage these pages have evolved over time into extremely powerful and easy-to-use applications, enabling people with all levels of knowledge the ability to manage and create pages.

This chapter provides an overview of some of the common tools, called content management systems, available to aid in the creation of a web page, and how DotNetNuke provides those tools.

This chapter answers the following questions:

• What is a content management system?

• What is open source?

• What is DotNetNuke, ...