In a previous post, I outlined the steps needed to take your mojoPortal SQL Server Database, back it up, and restore it on to your hosting providers database.

In this post, I’ll outline how to configure the web site. My hosting provider (at time of writing) is Arvixe. They had a good hosting deal for SQL Server and ASP.Net content management systems of which mojoPortal is one. As mentioned, any hosting provider will supply you with a URL which is your control panel’s web address, from where all web, file, database configuration is done. They will also supply you an FTP address so you can upload your files with something like FileZilla.

Most hosting providers will give you a free domain name (mydomain.com) or you can point your existing domain name to their IP. If I enter the Domain name they gave me at Arvixe for the initial account (eg mydomain.com), I get a landing page as follows:

So how does this help with getting a CMS like mojoPortal to display your web site? Remember we are uploading mojoPortal site(s) developed offline, uploading them to a web hosting provider.

Lets say the hosting company gave you a domain with your account mydomain.com but this is not your company or other URL that you built your mojoPortal site with. You need to add a new domain which matches the site you built offline with mojoPortal.

The Control Panel will have Domain Name administration functions. Add a top level domain if you want to use a domain name other than the free one the hosting provider gave you (if any). Often this is your business domain name you registered a long time ago. If you’re happy to use the free domain given by the hosting company and built the mojoPortal site with the same name, there’s no need to Add a new Domain.

Enter your mojoPortal sites Primary site domain name. Multisite setup’s run off the primary site. For example you’d enter mybusinessname.com or whatever the domain name is.

The Control Panel will then add the Domain to your account. You can have as many domains as your account allows.

Once each Domain is setup, you can administer each one separately, the web site is already setup with a wwwroot folder for each top level domain, ready for you to FTP the mojoPortal files. As you need to contact your domain name registrar to change your domain name Primary and Secondary Name servers to point to that of your hosting provider (if you just created an account) and this can take time to propagate, the hosting provider will commonly provide you with a temporary URL to test your site.

Using the Control Panel you can navigate to various web site settings for your soon to be live mojoPortal site.

You need to configure some settings then upload mojoPortal to the wwwroot folder of your hosting account. Under the Extensions Tab of your hosting account’s Web Site Settings

Change ASP.Net to 4.0 Integrated Pipeline if you downloaded mojoPortal for .Net 4.0

That’s basically all you need for mojoPortal but there are many configuration settings you can set. If you don’t need PHP or CGI-BIN or Cold Fusion you can disable these, reducing your sites surface area of attack.

Zip the mojoPortal folder contents on your local PC and Upload to your domain’s wwwroot folder. Since each top level domain has its own folder, each site could use other CMS’s, including PHP based ones. You can have www.site1.com, www.site2.com, www.site3.com each with its own folder structure with wwwroot at the starting point. www.site1 .com could be a mojoPortal site capable of running multiple sites with just the one install of mojoPortal. Hence if www.site1.com was the primary mojoPortal site, I could setup www.childsiteA.com and www.childsiteB.com to all run off the one mojoPortal setup. I’ll show how this is done in the Control Panel later.

Don't zip the wwwroot folder from your PC, just highlight all the files and folders off the root. wwwroot has certain permissions already set by the hosting company that you may want to preserve.

The Zip file is sent to the web site’s wwwroot folder. On setup it already contains a web.config and a default.aspx page which is the “Landing” page shown earlier. When the file is Unzipped, these will be replaced by the mojoPortal versions.

You should end up with all your mojoPortal files under wwwroot, just as it appears on your local PC.

Edit the web.config as per whatever settings you require for SMTP, Caching and so on. Edit the user.config database connection settings with the hosting providers login and password. The control panel File Manager provides a basic editor.

You can test the site with the temporary URL obtained when you setup the domain or your sites URL if your registrar setup is correct. If your database settings are correct, the mojoPortal site should come up.

What about the second site? Remember I had 2 sites in the /Data folder /Sites/1 (Primary – which is the Top Level Domain added via Control Panel) and /Sites/2 which is a completely separate web site defined within mojoPortal. The database restored to the hosting provider contains details for the second site, the files uploaded via FTP also contain the 2nd site.

You just need to create a domain Alias (should be an option on your control panel – below shown as last option)

In IIS, it is possible to host multiple mojoPortal sites using a shared ip address, but this requires adding host headers in IIS for each site that will be handled by mojoPortal. In effect this is what we are doing. When we add the 2nd site’s domain to “point” to an existing primary mojoPortal site its is a domain alias, mojoPortal will render the site. And remember your domain name registrar must be updated to point to the same IP or Name Servers as the Primary site.

In summary your hosting provider will support IIS 7 or later and SQL Server. You need to create a top level domain for the Primary mojoPortal site. This top level domain’s name is what you called the web site in mojoPortal (URL’s must resolve for images, style sheets and so on so you cant develop a mojoPortal site as site1.com and host it as a top level domain siteA.com). If you have one or more secondary sites running off the primary mojoPortal site, you need to create a Domain Alias for each secondary site – pointing to the domain of the primary site.

Every top level domain created will have a web.config and a default.aspx file in its own wwwroot folder. You just need to replace these when you FTP up your mojoPortal files. Secondary sites run off the Primary site so they use the same web.config as the primary site, since secondary sites are Domain Aliases, they don't have their own wwwroot folders anyway, relying only on the top level domain to which they are pointing too.