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

Menus


Navigation is the heart of any web site. It's your direct interface to your customers and allows you to guide them to all of the content that you've spent hours on putting together. A poorly laid out navigation menu can destroy the usability of your site, and can also transform your site into one that your customers/users will enjoy using. There are two common ways that menus are done within most ASP.NET web sites. The first is what I would consider the "old" way of doing it. That would be the manual method of making menus. By using simple HTML <a href..> tags, you could easily place a series of links on your page and, in reality, you have a menu. This will work great in certain circumstances. If your site has a very limited number of items you wish to display on the menu, if your menu is something that is likely to seldom change, and if you don't really have the need to dynamically enable or hide your menu items, then you may find that this simple menu system is one that will...