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

Reporting


Reporting for a web site can be as simple as you would like, or as complex as building the Empire State Building, and the ways to go about it are about as varied as anything out there. For the sake of time, and to keep you from being buried, we'll stick to a fairly simple approach, but we'll also touch upon some other suggestions and ideas.

To start off, we need to decide what exactly it is that we want to report on. A few simple, key items should be enough to get you started. In our site, let's track the page that's visited, when it's visited, and some basic browser information from the user. For this we will need to store this data someplace and our database is perfect. Let's create ourselves a new table, calling it SiteStats, with the following setup:

Like most of the pieces we've done to this point, we will need to create both a DAL and BLL for handling our data. As we're taking a very simplistic approach to our reporting, we'll go with a small, object-based system like we did...