One of the lesser recognized built in features of the Windows Home Server is that it does have a web server integrated into it. I’m sure many of you have used the Remote Access website, but how many of of you have wondered what else could you do with it? We’ve shown you how to install PHP for IIS, but that isn’t something that is built into IIS. Through much trial and error via email correspondence, ttoomm and fastphoto put together a great tutorial on how to take advantage of IIS out of the box and free software that is offered by Microsoft.
These Tutorials walk you through how to create a fully functional dynamic (ASP.NET 2.0) website on your Windows Home Server and do it for free. The completed website includes the following features:
- User Login
- User Forum
- News Articles
- Automatic Email Notifications
- Events Calendaring
- User Polls
- Membership Lists
- Animated Banners
- Two kinds of Photo Albums
- Three Built-in Themes
The two authors are Windows Home Server enthusiasts that decided that if WHS came with the IIS (Internet Information Services) Web Server built into it, then someone should figure how to put it to use. They ended up combining free Starter Kits downloaded from Microsoft’s ASP.NET with free Microsoft Express Software Kits. Along the way they had many, many false starts so they decided to write these tutorials so others would not “bleed” as much.
The tutorials are hopefully easy to follow and require absolutely no prior experience. These tutorials are being converted to the wiki format from downloadable PDF documents that the authors, fastphoto and ttoomm, have made available at: http://whswebsite.googlepages.com/
The website comes with about a dozen pages and dynamically creates more pages as you add photo albums, news, events, forum topics and more through the web interface. This is an example of the front page of the website.
More can be located on the We Got Served Wiki, or over at fastphoto and ttoomm’s webpage located at http://whswebsite.googlepages.com/.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:28 am
I am working through this right now. I seems very straight forward and easy to follow.
One question relating to IIS, can it be multi-homed on WHS??
Thanks,
Rich
April 24th, 2008 at 7:47 am
multi-homed, not quite sure what you mean. Do you mean multiple URLs on the same connection with different sites? If that is what you mean, yes for http, but no for https. IIS doesn’t support that for https.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
The [url="http://wegotserved.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Whiist_Website_Construction"]Whiist Website Construction [/url]wiki has been updated. Some folks were having problems getting the website to load from the Internet. Steps 9 - 13 were added to help resolve this problem
April 24th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
The “Whiist Website Construction” wiki as well as Part 2 on their download website have been updated. Some folks were having a problem getting the website to load from the Internet. Steps 9 - 13 were added to help alleviate this problem
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:26 am
Part 7 – WWC (Whist Website Construction) has been posted. This is the final document that is planned at this time. Part 7 includes modules for a User Forum, User Polls and Secure Downloads functionality.
This can be found with the previous six parts at
http://whswebsite.googlepages.com/
May 23rd, 2008 at 5:28 am
If it has been awhile since you have visited the http://whswebsite.googlepages.com/ site, you should go take a quick look again. As our counters show the Instructions and the wiki Whiist Website Creation have been fairly successful but that is not why another visit would be a good idea.
There is some new information and downloads you might find useful:
- There is a revised Starter Kit available for download. It includes three new themes, each with animations. And it has most of the fixes in Part 4 already done for you.
- If you have already started your site, the three new themes are available as an add-on too
- There is an added FAQ’s for the most frequent mistakes
- There is also a clearly marked Help section