The documentation site for the open source Content Management System DNN (formerly DotNetNuke).

The project uses the docfx library to pull XML comments from the DNN Platform source code and combine that with articles written in Markdown to form the documentation for DNN.

If you do not have Git installed you will need to install Git first. You can find instructions on installing Git from here

DocFX may be installed on Windows via Chocolatey by calling choco install docfx -y

If you are on MacOS you can install it with Homebrew brew install docfx

Or you can download and unzip docfx.zip from GitHub, extract it to a folder and then set your PATH to that folder so you can run it anywhere.

After installing DocFX, the next step is to clone this repo. 'Cloning the repo' will simply create a copy of the repo (files and folders) on your local machine so that you can work with them.

Note the following example command clones the repo to the location of c:\dev. Update the c:\dev location to your location of choice on your machine.

c:\dev> git clone https://github.com/DNNCommunity/DNNDocs.git

The previous command will have created a folder called DNNDocs in the c:\dev folder. Navigate to that directory by using the cd (Change Directory) command. cd into the DNNDocs folder.

c:\dev> cd DNNDocs

Next, you'll need to fork and/or clone the Dnn.Platform repository into a sub-folder of the DNNDocs root folder. The reason is that the project reads the XML comments in the source code and creates API documentation from that, in addition to the documentation center articles.

Please note this could take a few minutes depending on your connection speed.

c:\dev\dnn-docs>git clone https://github.com/dnnsoftware/Dnn.Platform.git

You should now be able to run the development version of the docs locally with the following command:

docfx --serve

[!NOTE] You should run your shell in administrator mode for this to work!

The first time, the compilation process could take quite a while. You may see a couple of warning messages. Eventually, you should see a message similar to:

Serving "C:\dev\DNNDocs\_site" on https://localhost:8080

Open that page up in your browser to see the documentation.