Project Overview

Before you start working on Advantage CMS, you first need to setup some sort of things for it to work properly.

Environments

The number of environments in your project is dependent on which plan you are on:

With the Starter plan, you get a single Live environment.
With the Professional plan, you will get a Development AND a Live environment.
With the Enterprise plan, you will get two Development AND Live environments.

Production vs. Development URLs

Production (Live) URL

Where your live website resides. ie. google.com - a URL must be entered for production systems (otherwise you will receive license validation errors on the front end). For example “advantagecsp.com” would work for www.advantagecsp.com and advantagecsp.com

Development URL

Enterprise edition comes with two development domains, that could be either a staging or beta environment. Your staging environment is your environment for testing. Where your website will exactly resembles the production environment. In other words, it's a complete but independent copy of the production environment, including the database. Your beta environment is your testing environment. When setting up your environment you must have web.config CustomErrors="Off" and Debug mode = “On”. You can have urls specified OR run on "localhost" OR have a url that ends in ".local". For example: “uat.advantagecsp.com” would work for www.uat.advantagecsp.com and uat.advantagecsp.com http://localhost:8080 would work http://uat.advantagecsp.local would work.

This includes a step by step guide to setup your project, before running it.

1. Setting up Developing Environment -
   • You must install .Net Framework 4.6.2 or higher developer pack.
   • You should have Visual Studio 2015 or higher(2017 - Recommended).
   • You should have SQL 2012 or higher.
     
     
2. Setting up Project -
   You don't need to do anything to setup your project, just open the project solution in VS IDE, and everything is ready to be customized.
   
   
3. Setting up Database Project -
   When you will open the solution, you will find 2 projects -
   • Database Project
   • Website Project
   
   Database Project - When you will be running your application then all the base tables, procedures & functions, which are going to be used for your CMS, are contained in this project. So, all you need to do is just publish it to your SQL Server.
   Steps -
   • Go to SQL Server and create a new database.
   • Go to your solution in Visual Studio, select database project, build it and then right click on the database project & select publish.
     
     
     
     
   • You will see a dialog Publish Database, click on edit to change 'Target database connection'.
     
     
     
     
     
   • Select 'Server Name', provide 'Authentication Credentials', and select your database, click 'OK' and publish it.
     
     
4. Setting up Website Project -
   
   After successful publish of the DB Project, the last step is to setup website project.
   Steps -
   
   • Expand your Website Project
   • Make a copy of web.dev.config, and rename it to web.config.
     
   • Open web.config, search for 'AdvantageCMSConnectionString' and change the connectionString -
     
     
     
     
   • Make sure your SQL Server has ASPState database, also do change its sqlConnectionString, which will be used for sessionState.