WebMatrix is a task-focused tool that is designed to make it
really easy to get started with web development. It minimizes the number
of concepts someone needs to learn in order to get simple things done, and
includes and integrates all of the pieces necessary to quickly build Web sites.
When you run WebMatrix it starts by displaying a screen like
below. The three icons on the right-hand side provide the ability to
create new Web sites – either using an existing open-source application from a
web application gallery, from site templates that contain some default pages
you can start from, or from an empty folder on disk:
Create a Web Site using an Existing Open Source
Application in the Web Gallery
Let’s create a new Web site. Instead of writing the
site entirely ourselves, let’s use the Web Gallery and take advantage of the
work others have done already.
We’ll begin by clicking the “Site from Web Gallery” link on
the WebMatrix home-screen. This will launch the below UI – which allows
us to browse an online gallery of popular open-source applications that we can
easily start from, tweak/customize, and then deploy using WebMatrix. The
applications within the gallery includes both ASP.NET and PHP applications
We can filter by category (Blog, CMS, eCommerce,
etc) or simply scroll through the entire list. For this first site let’s
create a blog. We’ll build it using the popular BlogEngine.NET open source
project:
When we select BlogEngine.NET and click
“Next”, WebMatrix will identify (and offer to download) the required components
that need to be installed on my local development machine in order for
BlogEngine.NET to run.
IIS Express is included with WebMatrix, so I
already have a web-server (and don’t need to-do anything in order to configure
it). SQL Compact Edition is also included with WebMatrix, so I also have
a light-weight database (and don’t need to-do anything in order to configure
it). Because SQL Compact is brand new, most projects in the Web Gallery
don’t support it yet. We expect most projects in the Web Gallery will add
it as an option though in the future. If a project requires either SQL
Express or MySQL as a database, and you don’t have them installed, they will
show up in the dependencies list below, and WebMatrix will offer to automatically
download, install, and configure them for you.
PHP applications in the web gallery (like
WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and SugarCRM – all of which are there) will download
and install both PHP and MySQL.
Because I already have SQL Express installed
on my machine, the only thing in my download list is BlogEngine.NET itself:
When I click the “I Accept” button, WebMatrix
will download everything we need and install it on our machine:
When we click the “OK” button, WebMatrix will
open up our new BlogEngine.NET project and display a site overview page for us:
This view within WebMatrix provides an
overview of the project, and some quick links to-do common things with it
(we’ll look at these more in a bit).
To start – we’ll click the “Run” button in the
Ribbon bar at the top. Clicking the “Run” button will launch the site
using the default browser you have configured on your system.
Alternatively, you can click to expand the list and pick which installed
browser you want to run the site with. Clicking the “Open in All
Browsers” option will launch multiple browsers for you at once:
IIS Express is included as part of WebMatrix –
and WebMatrix automatically configures IIS Express to run the project when it
is opened within the tool (no extra steps or configuration required).
Running BlogEngine.NET will launch a browser
and bring up the default page for the application (see below).
BlogEngine.NET by default ships with a home page that includes instructions on
how to customize the site:
If you read the text it describes how the
default adminsitrator password is “admin”/”admin”, and how you can login and
customize the look and feel and content of the site. Let’s login, then
use the online admin tool to customize some of the basic settings of the site
(the name, about the author, etc) and post two quick blog posts to get the site
started:
The beauty is that I didn’t have to write any
code (nor see any code for that matter) and was able to get the basics of our
site up and running in only a few minutes. This experience is a pretty
consistent with all of the other applications within the web gallery.
They are all designed such that you can quickly install them using WebMatrix,
run them locally, and then use their built-in admin tools to tweak/customize
their core content and structure.