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

Chapter 2. Adding a Database to a Content Management System

The simple Content Management System we developed in the last chapter worked, but there were plenty of drawbacks to the system we created. One of the major drawbacks was the use of the file system for storing content. Files can be insecure, text files can be unwieldy in size, and you can hold only text content in one. We could use other file types, maybe save the text as HTML to overcome some issues, but that means our content and our presentation are part of the same file. In a CMS, this is one of the issues we need to avoid.

Imagine something as simple as your boss deciding that headings in the pages will now be formatted as a <h2> heading with a purple font color. If we stored 500 pages as simple files that included the HTML, we would have to edit 500 files to change every heading. And you know that, once we finished that task, the company president would want the headings formatted simply as bold text in green. And we would...