Dotnetpanel Forums

Hello.

I feel a bit of a numpty posting this, because I'm sure with all the effort and development that has taken place over the years for DotNetPanel, the answer must be looking at me in the face.  But for the life of me I cannot see it.

So I've got hold of a Windows 2008 IIS server, installed the free Express edition.  Installation went well, everything looks groovy.  Except now I want to create a small website advertising the fact I'm selling shared hosting, and display a couple of hosting plans that random visitors of my website can choose to signup to.

Except how on earth do I integrate DotNetPanel into my website to do this?

I can see the hosting plans I setup under Default.aspx?pid=ecViewCategory&ResellerId=1&CategoryId=1.  But how do I get just the details of the hosting plans with a little Order button showing underneath, to appear on my www.myhostingcompany.com website?

I figure I could link to the default.aspx page with ProductID=x at the end for each plan, but then how do I re-skin that page to keep it in the same style as my website?  It also then seems pointless setting up a hosting plan with a description and certains things to highlight, when this would need to be manually written out on the home page.

This is why I'm certain I'm missing something here.  Surely DotNetPanel would cater for a guy who has a single page on his website advertising a couple or more hosting plans, and as soon as a random internet user hits the 'Order' button, DotNetPanel would kick in and do the rest.

 DNP provides web services to perform each of its tasks and looking into some ecommerce web services and thereafter calling them in your own web pages should be something to get you started on this.

Thanks all for the replies.

It turns out that pretty much everybody who uses DotNetPanel use another product like whmcs to actually provide the automatic signup and provisioning service, and not the DNP Ecommerce module itself.

The DNP guys need to do some major work on the documentation here.  Its just not clear whatsoever how to link to your new hosting plan and add it to your website for a user to click and sign up.  Initially it even appears that you need an account setup before you can select a hosting plan, which is a catch 22.  Surely, being the first step in actually having a hosted user, this needs to be called out in the docs?

Other than that, once a user account is setup the control panel does a fantastic job for administrating the users website.