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/.
