DotNetNuke is a well established open source, content management system (CMS). The platform allows users to develop multiple portals with different domain aliases using a single installation. Depending on your host though, you may have issues with URL cannonicalization. In plain English, this means that users that browse to your site with http://falconwebtech.com are redirected with a permanent 301 redirect to http://www.falconwebtech.com. It doesn't really matter which one you use, but to avoid duplicate content and enhance your sites' SEO rankings, pick one and follow the instructions below to setup the redirect on Windows IIS7.
I recently moved all my sites to a Rackspace Cloud Server - where you can Launch Windows Servers on the Cloud in Minutes. I moved while the Windows servers were still in Beta. Their support and service has been phenomenal and the Windows platform is now out of Beta. You have to setup and maintain your own server, but what an awesome service!
OK - back the the issue - how do I add the "www" prefix using the IIS7 Url Rewrite feature for multi-portal DNN installations? I won't cover it here, but install DNN, create a website in IIS7 that points to the installation.
Select the website and setup the bindings for the site. In this example, I have two portals setup on the DNN installation with four bindings - two domains each with and without the "www" prefix (http://www.hostwithfalcon.com & http://www.memorycardpro.com):
Once the bindings are setup, use IIS7's URL Rewrite functionality to setup the redirects.
;If you have not yet downloaded the URL Rewrite Module, you can do so at http://www.iis.net/download/urlrewrite. Using the URL Rewrite module is easy and Ruslan Yakushev does a great job of describing its use at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/using-the-url-rewrite-module/. From IIS7's Feature View, select URL Rewrite >> Add Rule >> Canonical domain name.
Next, select the primary domain - this doesn't really matter because we are going to change the default settings:
Now, select the rule that was just created and then select Edit.... under Inbound Rules. In the first section "Match URL" confirm that the pattern is (.*)
In the next section, Conditions, change the Pattern from the Primary Host Name you selected earlier - ^www\.hostwithfalcon\.com$ - to - ^(www\.)(.*)$ - This will redirect any incoming hostname to the URL specified in the redirect rule:
Finally, in the actions section, change the Redirect URL from the Primary Host Name you selected earlier - http://www.hostwithfalcon.com/{R:1} - to http://www.{HTTP_HOST}/{R:1} - the server varialbe {HTTP_HOST} is replaced with the host name the user browsed to.
Good luck! Hope this helps you!
Don
