ASP.NET 4.51, MVC 5
Have read Integrating a CMS into an established application-centric MVC website
We have a number of MVC applications that serve as public facing websites. The applications were built using MVC as that was the technology stack understood by the developers and primarily the content that was being delivered was based on business process data.
However more and more we are being asked to add "another page" to the websites which for all intents and purposes is a plain old static content page. This ultimately involves:
Adding a new route
Creating a view with the required HTML
We have various "home grown" solutions which now pull HTML from the database for these views. However this means we are writing custom back end data entry screens as well as 1 & 2 above.
So.... There must be a better way. Has anyone got any practical experience or suggestions on how to add simple CMS functionality that we can give to end users, plugged into our MVC application? We need to provide the following functionality to the end user:
Create new pages, edit pages using WYSIWYG
Add meta tags and canonical tags for SEO
Specify the url portion of the uri for SEO purposes
All insights appreciated.
Is it feasible to do the following:
Have a database table to house the content for these pages. e.g. title, summary, description, url, meta, image(s) etc...
In the front end have a template for these pages. The database data fills in the placeholders within this template.
Perhaps hold all the pages on a base URL like www.yoursite.com/page/dynamic-page-url-from-db
You can use the Remote attribute validation on the url field to make sure they are all unique in the database.
With this in mind, create a single Route to catch the requests and filter valid/invalid requests in the Page controller based on the URL provided with the db. If non-existent throw new HttpException(404, "Page Not Found"); and have an error handler pick that up and deliver your 404.
META could be set via ViewBag or a dedicated section that alters the _Layout file at the point of rendering the view.
TinyMCE is a decent WYSIWYG editor. You can even add dynamic image gallery functionality to it if you want to embed images within the main body of the pages.
I'm working on making a CMS currently used in a demanding production environment into a product. I've just (as of 20 Jan 2015) made a NuGet package which installs the CMS into an MVC project which should be possible to add to any existing MVC site without breaking it. CMS functionality can then be added where needed. Currently I'm looking to work with some users to help them get the CMS into production on their sites, however this may have changed by the time you read this. Look at http://www.lynicon.com for more information and to sign up to a Slack community where I can give you access to the NuGet package.
Related
I made an ASP.NET MVC application which allows user to create dynamic websites. I need to add feature which will allow to download from server off-line version of choosen website as static html files with menu, hyperlinks, images, documents etc. It should work similar to applications such as Teleport Pro, but I have to choose from Admin Panel which content should be export.
Client wants to burn static website on CD, save on pendrive.
Do you have any ideas how to begin? Please help.
I currently have implemented that in a current project...
User is able to change anything in the frontend and at the end he can publish and download the offline files... the site subscribe users and show all prizes, winners and more information about that campaign.
All was done in ASP.NET MVC3 under .NET4 and hosted in AppHarbor.
It's composed at several applications but for what you want, you develop the Backend and the Frontend, and to generate the static files, simple use the Frontend to grab the full HTML
As an example, I can show what 2 users did...
Callme.dk did http://callme.julekal.info and
Sony Nordic did http://sony.julekal.info
plus, you can simply point custom domains to it as well like http://sonynordicxmas.net/
To publish and generate all files:
one part of the editing:
So I give the users, offline access (through the .zip file), online access (through the frontend application) and the ability of using custom domains...
I think the only way this might be possible is if you go to every single page and then use your browser to "Save" the web page script and all.
However this causes several issues;
You never quite get everything and you need to massage the HTML produced, dowload all the images etc to get the page to look right
Each html file now has an associated folder with the same name and each time you do this you will get another html file with a folder. You can combine all the folders into a single one but that leads me to item 3.
You will need to edit each html file to clear up any pathing issues if you want to share a single source folder.
Data is no longer dynamic!
You need to, if you want to link all the pages to each other, edit every single html file and resolver the anchor tags.
This is too much work and I think it actually breaks the true requirement.
Don't do it! :)
I am working on an ASP.NET 3.5 Web Application project in C#. I have manually added a Google-friendly sitemap which includes entries for every page in the project - this is not a CMS.
<url>
<loc>http://www.mysite.com/events.aspx</loc>
<lastmod>2009-11-17T20:45:46Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
The client updates events using an admin back-end. Other than that, the site is relatively static. I'm trying to decide on the best way to update the <lastmod> values for a handful of pages that are regularly updated.
In particular, I am using the QueryStringField of the ListView control to enhance SEO as described here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211029044137/https://www.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/010610-1.aspx
http://gsej.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/using-a-datapager-with-both-a-querystringfield-and-renderdisabledbuttonsaslabels/
When the QueryStringField property is set, the DataPager renders the paging interface as a series of hyperlinks which the crawler can follow and index. However, if Google has crawled my list of events two days ago, and in the meantime, the admin has added another dozen events... say the page size is set to 6; in this case, the Google SERP links would now be pointing to the wrong pages. This is why I need to be sure that the sitemap reflects changes to the events page as soon as they happen.
I have already looked though other SO questions for info and didn't find what I needed. Can anyone offer some guidance or an alternative approach?
UPDATE:
Since this is a shared hosting environment, a directory watcher/service won't work:
How to create file watcher in shared webhosting environment
UPDATE:
Starting to realize that I may need signify to Google that the containing page has been updated; update the last-modified HTTP header?
Rather than using a hand-coded sitemap, create a sitemap handler that will generate the sitemap on the fly. You can create a method in the handler that will grab pages from an existing navigation sitemap, from the database, or even from a hard-coded list of pages. You can create an XmlDocument from the list, and write the InnerXml of the document out to the handler response stream.
Then, create a class with a method that will automatically ping search engines with the above handler's URL (like http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.ashx).
Whever someone adds a new event, call the above method. This will ping Google using your latest sitemap (freshly generated by the above method).
You want to make sure that the ping only works if the sitemap has actually been updated. You could use File.SetLastWriteTime on events.aspx in the AddNewEvent handler to signify that the containing page has been updated.
Aslo, be careful to make sure there have been no pings for the last hour (as Google guidelines discourage pinging more than once per hour).
I actually plan to implement this in the following OSS project: http://cyclemania.codeplex.com. I will let you know once it's done and you can have a look.
If you let your user add events to the website you are probably using a database.
This means you can generate the XML-Sitemap at runtime like this:
create a page where your sitemap will be available (this doesn't need to be sitemap.xml but can also be sitemap.aspx or even sitemap.ashx).
open a database connection
loop through all records and create an Xml Element for each record
This blog post should help you further: Build a Search Engine SiteMap in C#.
It is not using the new XElements from .Net 3.5, but is will work fine.
You can put this in an aspx page, but adding an HttpHandler is probably better as described on the same blog, different post: (creating a httphandler for a sitemap)
I work for a college and our main website has an ASP.NET based course information search which I created. This has become popular and our company facing website (training for companies) has asked for the same system on their website. I'm not involved in the day to day of either website but know theirs was made using Wordpress. Is it going to be possible for me to embed some ASP.NET code within some of the pages? Any articles on doing this?
EDIT:
The ASP.NET code that would appear in the actual Markup is minimal it's mainly a few asp:Literals I did this on purpose to hide most of it from the website developer to save myself hassle when something gets deleted by accident.
EDIT2 There was a response to do it as a webservice would this be possible. i.e. as search box on the main page displaying the results underneath.
Since asking this question a long time ago and creating a less than ideal iframe solution I have now found a great wordpress plugin called iframe-less
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/iframe-less-plugin/
Basically you give it an URL and it builds the content of that page directly into your wordpress page. So far it seems to work really well.
I have similar needs that the originator of this thread has. I maintain a CRM and corporate site that runs on ASP.NET/SQL along with a separate Wordpress php company blog. After we've been using Wordpress for a year, people here would love to be able to edit static content on our corporate site like we do in Wordpress, so I am looking at possible ASP.NET/Wordpress hybrid set ups.
I am hearing good things about "Phalanger": http://www.php-compiler.net
It is a PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework, and you can run PHP code in .NET
It was also great to find out in this thread that you can have PHP and ASP.NET in the same IIS web, its another reasonable sounding solution. If I had any nay reputation (I am new here) I'd give RickNZ a vote.
What you could do is create a web service on your ASP.NET application and then write a Wordpress plugin, that would read that service and display it in wordpress page.
This wasn't ideal but the solution I produced involved using IFrames which are still in the HTML 5 spec (infact they have some new attributes) so I think I am ok. Basically I make a page in wordpress with an IFrame and some javascript on its onload to make the iframe resize automatically based on the content size using the code below (iframe called frame with width 100 percent).
function autoIframe(){
try
{
var page_height = document.getElementById('frame').contentWindow.document.body.scrollHeight;
document.getElementById('frame').height = page_height+60;
}
catch (err)
{
window.status = err.message;
}
}
This code will resize on loading of the first content, if the content changes it will need to be called in someway. My solution was to call the method from the innerpage using parent.autoIFrame() each time a search was done.
p.s. The javascript will only work if the iframe and outer page are from the same domain (No cross site scripting).
Wordpress uses PHP and MySql. I have successfully installed and run it under Windows 2008 with IIS 7. The new CGI stuff in IIS 7 results in pretty good performance, too.
You can of course run a separate but related ASP.NET-based site on the same server.
You can also run a mixed ASP.NET + PHP site. IIS directs incoming requests to a particular HttpHandler based on the extension of the URL, so there's no reason why you can't mix *.php & *.aspx.
In fact, you can also do things like write a .NET-based HttpModule that integrates with a PHP/IIS site, to do things like logging, centralized cookie management, HTTP header "adjusting", etc.
If you want to put ASP.NET controls in a *.php file, that's a different thing entirely. To do that, you would need to write an HttpHandler that understood how to parse such a file. Either that, or just use iframes....
Short answer: no, not easily. Wordpress is PHP - you can't just put some .net code on a PHP page.
Long answer: yes, if... if you are really keen to do this, and it's worth the time and effort, you can work around it by using some of the strategies suggested already, e.g.: host the ASP.NET bit on a windows server (or use mono) and show it inside an iframe on the wordpress page.
Just bare in mind that this is not a common setup, and may be more difficult than simply creating or using some kind of Wordpress plugin.
I am exploring http://sourceforge.net/projects/wordpressnet/ if it helps anyone ...
Also,
http://wpdotnet.com/ (related article : http://www.php-compiler.net/blog/2011/wordpress-on-net-4-0)
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/installing-to-a-net-server
I know it is an old post and I too do not prefer necroposting but
these resources may improve the existing content.
WordPress is a LAMP(Linux Apache MySQL PHP) application, and normally running in Linux servers. I don't think you can integrate ASP.Net to wordpress. But off course you can provide link to ASP.Net application from WordPress.
No, this won't work. You cannot use ASP.NET on pages that are served by WordPress. You can use ASP.NET in the same web site as Wordpress, for example by having certain directories or certain pages serve ASP.NET content, while the rest of the site still serves WordPress content.
However, if the ASP.NET code you wish to use is very simple, why not do it in PHP instead? WordPress uses PHP, which is very similar to ASP.NET.
I can be able to use both Asp.Net and Wordpress on my Host (Dinamo.net.tr)
without using any plugin or iframe.
They can really work together,
you just upload your Asp.Net C# files,
and install Wordpress at the same time.
I'm writing a pretty straight forward ASP.NET MVC web app: only a couple of CRUD pages, some folders where clients can browse documents and just 3 or 4 roles. The website will be used in a B2B scenario, where every client will have their "own" website.
At this point, the only thing that will change in the website, from client to client is the content (ie. the documents, and the rows of data they'll see). If this is the case, what's the best way to manage roles across all of my clients? I'm looking for the simplest possible solution because this is a proof of concept and I don't want to invest a lot of time right now.
What if it's not just the content that changes? Maybe some clients will want a few custom static pages. At this point, is my only option replicating the entire website? I'm leery of this because it'll become hard to maintain if I get a lot of clients.
I'd appreciate any help... I just don't want to shoot myself in the foot; I'm sure someone has done this before.
I create Virtual Directories in IIS for each client, all pointed back to the same folder where my ASP.NET code resides.
This allows me to support several dozen nearly-identical "web sites," each with their own database that is basically identical in form, only differs in data.
So, my site URLs look like:
http://mysite.com/clientacme/
http://mysite.com/clientbill/
http://mysite.com/clientcharlie/
There are two key implementation details I worked out for this:
I use the Virtual Directory folder name to determine which DSN my code reads from. This is accomplished by creating a simple static method that injects the folder name into a DSN string template. If you want to use the same database to store everyone's data, you can use the folder name as a default filter in your queries.
I store the settings for each web site (headers and footers, options, links to custom reports, etc.) in a simple "settings" table in each database (key, value) rather than in the web.config (which is shared). This allows me to extend the code base over time to customize the experience for each client without forking the code.
For user authentication, I use Basic authentication, and I keep usernames, passwords, and roles in a table in each database.
The important thing is that if you use different SQL Server databases for each client's content, you need to script any changes to your database tables, indexes, etc. and apply them across all databases at the same time (after testing of course). One simple way to do this is to maintain an Excel sheet with a table of database names and a big "SQL" cell at the top. Beside each database name, create a formula to "USE databasename;" and then concat the SQL code at the top.
I'm not sure if this answers your question completely, but as far as maintaining custom "static" pages I found myself implementing a system on a client's MVC website where the client can create "Pages" from their admin control panel and each Page has a collection of "PageContent" entities which consist of a Title and and HTML content field (populated using a WYISWYG editor). Upon creating a page the MVC application maps http://yoursite.com/Page/Page-Url-Specified-By-The-User to that page and renders its content there. Obviously, the pages are dynamic, but as far as the client can tell they have created a brand new custom page with little or no effort.
Mentioned stackoverflow only as an example, but if you look above the URL for ask is
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask
which means /ask is a subdirectory, but they also do this for the specific question pages. How do you code this in .NET?
Not a code question as much as a technique. I know this is great for SEO, but how do you create a site so that every "page" is its own directory? Dynamically.
Do you have a template or a hidden redirect???
How?? :)
It's termed URL rewriting:
Url Rewriting with ASP.NET
MSDN: URL Rewriting in ASP.NET
EDIT: As #Justice points out, StackOverflow uses Routing.
StackOverflow uses something called Routing, which comes with .NET 3.5 SP1. Routing is a popular feature of a number of MVC frameworks, such as ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails, and a number of Python and PHP frameworks.
Stack Overflow was built using ASP.NET MVC which uses a technique called Routing, see:
What Was Stack Overflow Built With?
and Routing
Stack Overflow uses ASP.net MVC
MVC uses the URL + Query String to determine the content, so its not like a URL which points to a specific page, but more like a hierarchical path to the properties of some data to be displayed
E.G. https://stackoverflow.com/users/[Put User ID Here]/[Put User Name Here]
prompts the website to display a USER with an ID specified in the path ( in this case the user name is probably just for kicks ) as opposed to a specific page created just for that user.
I have seen this accomplished by simply creating a folder for every web page and then having each folder contain a Default.aspx document (Assuming Default.aspx is setup as a default document in IIS, which it is by default). Then you can navigate to any folder on the site without specifying the page (Default.aspx).
For the dynamic part, I have worked with CMS systems that do it this way and the Default.aspx page simply inherits from some master template and the CMS system utilizes the ASP.NET rendering enginge to dynamically complete the web page.
Using folders may be a little heavy with the site structure, but it is an easy way to eliminate the page names from the browser.
This is how I structure my website and avoid having to use page names... for example http://www.innovaapps.net/Blog simply brings up the default.aspx page without having to specify the page name.