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

Tips and Tricks


I don't want to have a summary page. On my site, we need to ensure that the default posting is the most recent posting added to the channel; how can we do that?

The trick is to set the SortOrdinal property of the posting to equal the number of postings such that the most recent posting always has the highest SortOrdinal value. Another method is to set the Default Posting Name to be that of the last posting added to the channel. You can do this by writing a script in the Workflow Event Handlers (discussed in Chapter 16) to update these properties whenever a new posting is created and approved.

How can I display the contents of placeholders in my summary page? For example, I would like to have the plant's image displayed alongside its name.

Use the code in Chapter 12 to get the contents of the placeholder you wish to display and add them to the code used to generate the summary.