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

Creating a Template Gallery Item


Creating an ASPX template file as we did in the previous section is only half the story. We still need to create an entry in the MCMS repository (or the template gallery item) to let MCMS know about the template file we’ve created.

Viewing the MCMS Template Explorer

An additional window appears in Visual Studio .NET for projects that are MCMS enabled: the MCMS Template Explorer.

The MCMS Template Explorer (shown on the next page) provides a graphical interface to manage template galleries and template gallery items. In Chapter 4, we created template galleries using Site Manager. We can do the same using the MCMS Template Explorer in Visual Studio .NET.

This is a good feature that nicely integrates Visual Studio .NET with MCMS. It gives template designers the ability to use a single tool to maintain templates. They don’t have to use Site Manager to maintain template galleries; all required tasks to create and update templates can be performed from within Visual...