Book Image

ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development

Book Image

ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development

Overview of this book

ASP.NET 3.5 is equipped with a built-in security system, standard design templates, and easy configurations for database connections, which make it the ideal language for building a content management system. With the strong community support for the ASP.NET platform, you can be assured that what you write today will be around and supported for years to come. You can imagine how easy it is to get lost in the myriad features especially if you are a newcomer. This book shows you how to make use of ASP.NET's features and create a functional Content Management System quickly and conveniently. You will learn how to build your site and see the different ways in which you can customize your code to fit your needs. With this book in hand, you can easily set up users and groups, create valuable content for your users, and manage the layout of your site efficiently. All you need is a basic understanding of coding and a desire to learn, and this book will take care of the rest. This book will teach you to get your site up and running quickly, and maintain its content even if you have little or no web design or programming experience. It will give you all the knowledge you need to use the tools as well as the code required to make yourself a strong developer far beyond your site. It begins with setting up your programming environment and coding a Content Management System. You will learn how to install and configure a database and connect it to your CMS. You will be able to create content and manage the layout of your site, and also make it available beyond the browser. At the end of this book, you will have designed and built a CMS that allows you to administer an Articles section, Images and Files sections, as well as a full set of Administrator tools for your site.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
ASP.NET 3.5 Content Management System Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface

Basic site settings


Most CMS sites have a number of settings that you can configure from within the Control Panel. These are typically the Site Name (as it appears on the header), the Site Image (again from the header), and the Footer text. In addition to these three, you will often also see settings to maintain the Theme, as well as a section for "additional header information", which you can use for any extra scripts you want to place in each page and also for things such as analytics scripts. For these items, we will need a way to maintain them and store these settings. Just as with our site content, we have a number of options for storing them, but for our CMS, we'll stick with using the database that we've already created. You should already be familiar with creating a new database table, so I won't go into great detail here. However, for our purpose, you will want to create the table, calling it SiteSettings, with the following columns/data types defined:

We now have the table created...