I have everything working except 1 MAJOR thing. When I got to Chapter 10, I removed the sample info from Default.aspx to match TheBeerHouse's Default.aspx page. When I do this, the page is CenterCol content is blank. I've copied & pasted the template.master, default.aspx, themes, web.config, configSection.cs, BasePage.cs and BaseWebPart.cs BUT still no display....

Please give me your thoughts and let me know what I may be missing. This seems to be my last hurdle and is frustrating. I wanna drink for New Years and this is a downer...

No one else having or had this problem? No ideas on what it could be?

I have exactly this problem. I think.

I have made a new opera community website based on The Beer House Starter Kit. I installed the Beer House in my Visual Studio 2005 Websites folder as directed using the ASPNETDB.MDF. It works fine - no problems at all. Next I made a number of simplifications and added a bunch of new features to my opera site and it too works fine.

I created a SQLServer 2005 database attached to my opera site and that too works fine. However when I transferred it to my local IIS I got a blank center zone instead of the welcome box. Everything else seems to work fine except the blank center section on the default page. I next transferred the unmodified Beer House site to my Inetpub/webroot/ directory and registered it with IIS. It also worked perfectly except for the black default page center section.

This is odd.

It's either an issue with template.master, or else your web parts configuration. You probably aren't paying attention to copying the aspnet tables, which hold web parts config. Log in as admin and try to edit your web parts to put the Welcome box back.

You should also test your news and forums. If you don't copy the tables right you can lose all that stuff.

I have solved my problem, thanks.

This is what gets me mad. How do we fix this issue? I double checked and compared the download code and have same problem with blank center container too.

Then some other poster says it fix his issue but won't share with us what was his issue that he fixed.

If you check some of the older postings you'd already have your answer. When you deploy your website the very first thing you must do is to log in as an admin and set up the web-parts. This is because deployment doesn't copy the system data of which web-parts is a member.

I monitor this forum and from time to time answer, but my time (and I imagine Eric's) is limited so I now post answers when they haven't been previously answered. So, if you have a question, by all means ask it but you might get a quicker answer if you check some of the older threads.

I know you can get the webparts to show when logged in as the ADMIN. My issue is when you first access the site, you are not logged in so the damn default.aspx page has nothing on the content section of the page.

 

It occured to be that my answer might seem a bit impolite but I solved the display problem in a way that is a little embaressing.

From the previous posts it seemed clear that it was a Web Parts personalization issue. I have a vanilla Beer House project that works as advertised in the VS 2005 folder but exhibited the blank default page when it was migrated to IIS. As per another posting I used the Web Parts Catalog menu that appears when you logon to add the Welcome box. It then worked fine. However my real project which had the same problem exhibited a bunch of other difficulties that made this solution fail.

So I simply removed all the Web Parts code.

I decided I didn't want personalization of the overall site. I want personalization only in a sub-site area where members will have a lot of choices for layout, themes, features etc... However I want the main areas to look the same for everyone.

I also pulled all the newsletter code out because I can't support a newsletter at this time. At such time as I get a volunteer newsletter author and editor, I will put that code back.

There, now I've shared.

Users who aren't logged-in will see the shared view of the web parts. If you sign in as admin you can change the context to edit the shared view. Then you can select which parts anonymous users will see.
Otherwise you only see the "admin user" view by default.