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

MCMS Is a Content Repository


As we've said, MCMS connects to a backend SQL Server 2000 database. All MCMS objects—such as content entered by authors—are stored in this database.

One of the greatest sources of confusion for developers is that web pages rendered by MCMS do not have a "physical" form. If you search your server's hard drive for the about+us.htm file or the summary.htm in the WoodgroveNet sample site that ships with the CD (or can be downloaded from the Microsoft website at www.microsoft.com/cmserver), you won't find any.

The reason is because the pages are not stored in the file system. Chunks of information are stored in the content repository (namely SQL Server database) instead. They are assembled on the fly when requested, based on the logic coded by developers using the template files discussed in the earlier section How MCMS Renders Content.

Template files are a special kind of a web form. They are stored in the file system and contain the logic that governs the look and feel of the pages and how they behave. As a developer, you will work with template files to write all code-behind scripts and HTML. We discuss template files in Chapter 6.