Cytanium - a newly launched discount shared hosting venture backed by OrcsWeb – has an extremely functional and usable control panel. One of the many features it has is the ability to leverage Microsoft’s Web Application Gallery (WAG) to automatically install dozens of different free applications. Just to show how easy is it, I grabbed some screenshots of me stepping through the process to install Orchard CMS on my Cytanium hosting account…
The icon to enter the Web Application Gallery is located right in the main interface of the Cytanium hosting control panel. Once in the WAG part of the control panel, all of the available applications are listed alphabetically. You can change the drop-down list to narrow down the selection, or just scroll through the different pages to see all the options.
Once I found Orchard CMS in the list, I can click on the name of the application or I can click Install right from the result list.
The first screen before the download and install actually kicks-off just gives a short summary about the application chosen. Click next to begin the download.
You’ll then get a dialog box showing that the application is being downloaded from the vendor to your hosted site on the server.
After the download you are prompted for some basic installation parameters. (NOTE: Orchard CMS supports SQL CE but the WAG doesn’t yet, so installation through the WAG requires SQL Server 2008. To use SQL CE I’d recommend downloading to WebMatrix then using Web Deploy to publish up to the server. Not ideal because of the extra steps, but it is fairly easily and works great!)
Wait a short few moments while it installs.
And that’s it!
You can now click on the link to launch Orchard CMS which has its own configuration wizard to finalize its setup.
Happy hosting!