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

Chapter 21. Aggregating Content

We are coming into the final stretch of development for the TropicalGreen site. We have the main sections of the site built, the workflow set up, the Authoring Connector in place, and the login page working. From a high-level perspective, it seems that we are just about done!

But wait! If we go to http://localhost/tropicalgreen/ what do we see?

The standard MCMS cover page shows a simple channel listing and the MCMS 2002 logo. We need to replace it with a proper home page for the TropicalGreen website, one that will serve as a starting point to all other areas of the site. While the look of the pages is important, we will not focus on the design. Instead, we will show you how to write code to pull information from different areas of the site for display on a single page. We choose the front page because it is usually the most prominent page where information should be aggregated. Of course, you can apply these techniques to any section within the site.

In this...