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

Chapter 9. Default Postings and Channel Rendering Scripts

We can create many fact sheets for our Plant Catalog, but none of them can be found unless people know the URLs. A summary page (also known as an index page, default page, or cover page) is a page that typically lists pages within a given section. In this chapter, we introduce the concept of default postings and channel rendering scripts and the use of these techniques to create a summary page. Our summary page will list the plants from A-Z and provide hyperlinks to the corresponding fact sheets.

Making a summary page is nice, because if someone only knows the existence of the plant catalog, they can access the fact sheets without having to know the exact name of the plant that they are looking for. Another benefit of using generated summary pages is better link management. Before the days of content management, webmasters manually updated hyperlinks to a summary page. It was a manual and tedious process that often led to HTTP 404...