DNN Platform Overview
This is an extract from the Wrox book Professional DNN 7 by Shaun Walker et al. Copyright remains with P.A. Donker and Wiley Publishers.
This chapter introduces you to some of the core concepts of the DNN Platform and gives an overview of how these fit together. Over the years DNN has evolved and changed appearance considerably but overall the structure has remained the same. What you have installed through the previous chapter is an extensible "web application framework". With it you can create all kinds of web based applications. But to do so you will need to understand some of the core concepts that underpin it. And to complicate things a little bit the terminology has evolved over the years as well. This means that some concepts have a different name in the UI than they have in code (and in SQL), purely because at one point it was decided that the old term was confusing or too "techie" so it was dropped for something more easily understandable. Because this is a largely technical book, I will stick to the terms used in the DNN API, but I will note if they have another name in the UI.