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

Summary


Congratulations—you’ve now created your first template! Templates ensure that a consistent look and feel is applied across pages that are generated from it. They also act as special kinds of web forms where authors can enter content in special editable regions without needing to know how to create a web page.

Templates are made up of two distinct parts:

  • Template files

  • Template gallery items

Template files are created and managed in Visual Studio .NET in MCMS-enabled projects. Developers define the layout, design, and behavior of the page by writing code in template files.

MCMS provides an add-on to Visual Studio .NET called MCMS Template Explorer. Developers use the MCMS Template Explorer to create MCMS template gallery items in the MCMS repository. Once created, template gallery items are linked to template files.

You created the first posting based on the Plant template and viewed it from the browser. Because this is the first posting in the website, we used the Web Author Console...