WebMatrix is a task-focused tool that is designed to make it really easy to get started with web development.  It minimizes the number of concepts someone needs to learn in order to get simple things done, and includes and integrates all of the pieces necessary to quickly build Web sites.

When you run WebMatrix it starts by displaying a screen like below.  The three icons on the right-hand side provide the ability to create new Web sites – either using an existing open-source application from a web application gallery, from site templates that contain some default pages you can start from, or from an empty folder on disk:

Create a Web Site using an Existing Open Source Application in the Web Gallery

Let’s create a new Web site.  Instead of writing the site entirely ourselves, let’s use the Web Gallery and take advantage of the work others have done already.

We’ll begin by clicking the “Site from Web Gallery” link on the WebMatrix home-screen.  This will launch the below UI – which allows us to browse an online gallery of popular open-source applications that we can easily start from, tweak/customize, and then deploy using WebMatrix.  The applications within the gallery includes both ASP.NET and PHP applications

We can filter by category (Blog, CMS, eCommerce, etc) or simply scroll through the entire list.  For this first site let’s create a blog. We’ll build it using the popular BlogEngine.NET open source project:

When we select BlogEngine.NET and click “Next”, WebMatrix will identify (and offer to download) the required components that need to be installed on my local development machine in order for BlogEngine.NET to run.

IIS Express is included with WebMatrix, so I already have a web-server (and don’t need to-do anything in order to configure it).  SQL Compact Edition is also included with WebMatrix, so I also have a light-weight database (and don’t need to-do anything in order to configure it).  Because SQL Compact is brand new, most projects in the Web Gallery don’t support it yet.  We expect most projects in the Web Gallery will add it as an option though in the future.  If a project requires either SQL Express or MySQL as a database, and you don’t have them installed, they will show up in the dependencies list below, and WebMatrix will offer to automatically download, install, and configure them for you.

PHP applications in the web gallery (like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and SugarCRM – all of which are there) will download and install both PHP and MySQL.

Because I already have SQL Express installed on my machine, the only thing in my download list is BlogEngine.NET itself:

When I click the “I Accept” button, WebMatrix will download everything we need and install it on our machine:

When we click the “OK” button, WebMatrix will open up our new BlogEngine.NET project and display a site overview page for us:

This view within WebMatrix provides an overview of the project, and some quick links to-do common things with it (we’ll look at these more in a bit).

To start – we’ll click the “Run” button in the Ribbon bar at the top.  Clicking the “Run” button will launch the site using the default browser you have configured on your system.  Alternatively, you can click to expand the list and pick which installed browser you want to run the site with.  Clicking the “Open in All Browsers” option will launch multiple browsers for you at once:

IIS Express is included as part of WebMatrix – and WebMatrix automatically configures IIS Express to run the project when it is opened within the tool (no extra steps or configuration required). 

Running BlogEngine.NET will launch a browser and bring up the default page for the application (see below).  BlogEngine.NET by default ships with a home page that includes instructions on how to customize the site:

If you read the text it describes how the default adminsitrator password is “admin”/”admin”, and how you can login and customize the look and feel and content of the site.  Let’s login, then use the online admin tool to customize some of the basic settings of the site (the name, about the author, etc) and post two quick blog posts to get the site started:

The beauty is that I didn’t have to write any code (nor see any code for that matter) and was able to get the basics of our site up and running in only a few minutes.  This experience is a pretty consistent with all of the other applications within the web gallery.  They are all designed such that you can quickly install them using WebMatrix, run them locally, and then use their built-in admin tools to tweak/customize their core content and structure.