Book Image

Building Websites with Microsoft Content Management Server

Book Image

Building Websites with Microsoft Content Management Server

Overview of this book

Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 is a dynamic web publishing system with which you can build websites quickly and cost-efficiently. MCMS provides the administration, authoring, and data management functionality, and you provide the website interface, logic, and workflow. Once your website is up and running, your content contributors can add and edit content on their own, without the need to work with developers or the IT department. First time developers of Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 face a relatively steep learning curve. Not only are they expected to be conversant in the Microsoft .NET Framework, they are also required to be familiar with the concepts of MCMS 2002. Many beginners to MCMS start out by looking at the example site that ships with the product; tweaking it, dissecting it and turning it inside out using the obscure code comments as markers. However, when it comes to starting their own website from scratch, many are baffled ? where do they begin? This book exists to answer that question; teaching the essential concepts of MCMS 2002 in a clear, straightforward and practical manner. Containing answers to some of the most asked questions in developer newsgroups, this book is a treasure trove of tricks and tips for solving the problems faced by MCMS developers. This is a unique resource focused exclusively on the needs of developers using MCMS. It doesn?t waste time and pages on user or administrator level information that is well covered in other documentation. It?s a distillation of practical experience that developers need to get results, fast. The authors carefully structured example project complements and extends the knowledge gained from an initial look at the examples that ship with MCMS.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Building Websites with Microsoft Content Management Server
Credits
About the Authors
Introduction

Deriving from the MCMS Placeholder Controls


Was building the TextBoxPlaceholderControl a lot of work? You bet it was. You wrote lines and lines of code just to add a TextBox in authoring mode and a Label in presentation mode.

What if you just wanted to modify the way an existing placeholder control works? For example, perhaps you simply wanted to add a property that sets the alignment of an image inserted in the SingleImagePlaceholderControl. Would you like to create your own version of the SingleImagePlaceholderControl from scratch? That would work but most developers would prefer not to.

Fortunately, those nice people at Microsoft did not seal the SingleImagePlaceholderControl class, and we can inherit directly from it. When we do, we immediately get all the features already built into it. All we need to do is to modify the parts we want to enhance.