After looking at several content management systems it was decided that DotNetNuke (also known as DNN) would be the preferred choice. DNN is a rapidly growing open source CMS that leverages a modular component system and allowed us to extend the site with a video library, blog, news articles and forms.

In addition to an easy to use CMS system, Canvas Systems needed a fully featured shopping cart that allowed potential clients to add multiple items to a quote before submitting the request to the sales department. Adding to the complexity of the quote system we needed to support product filtering, search, and a large item base of over 1000 items. At the time there were no out of the box solutions for a DotNetNuke based module that would satisfy all the needed requirements. There were only two options; either we needed to write a custom set of modules to do what was needed, or we could implement a separate website with ecommerce capabilities that wasn’t on DotNetNuke. There was a third option that we entertained, and after initial testing, decided upon. The third option was to combine the DotNetNuke website with ASPDotNetStoreFront in the same website application space and recreate the DotNetNuke menu structure on ASPDotNetStoreFront via custom programming using ASPDotNetStoreFront‘s xml based package system.

By combining the Content Management System DotNetNuke with the e-commerce platform ASPDotNetStorefront a hybrid site was developed to obtain the best of both worlds. Integrating the two different platforms into one seamless website was probably the most difficult challenge. Separately, they are world class products that make management and development easy. Combined they provide the perfect E-commerce and Content Management solution.

Challenge

1. Integrate an easy to use Content Management Solution that allowed flexibility for growth but didn’t limit aesthetic tastes
2. Provide a full featured SEO friendly quote system for the thousands of products they offered
3. Provide Multilingual support for a large number of languages
4. Integrate a comprehensive search system that would index and search all content on the website.

Solution

1. Deployed DotNetNuke Community Edition as the foundation for the site to provide comprehensive content management and design implementation
2. Integrated ASPDotNetStorefront ML as a separate sub-site to DotNetNuke and carried over the DotNetNuke design into the storefront
3. Converted all images/headers to web-safe fonts and implemented Google Translate on all pages in order to provide support for 25+ languages
4. Integrated Google Search into the site to search across both the DotNetNuke CMS site and the ASPDotNetStorefront quote system.