Using wordpress as external content management system - asp.net

We are planning to create an asp.net website (probably mvc), that needs a cms for news items.
Our content managers and others who require to publish news have asked if they can use wordpress for content management.
Our users have different roles, and news items should be visible to certain roles, or even specific users if possible.
The reason they want wordpress is the manager's user friendliness, so if some other alternative with the same kind of user experience would be ok.
Could anyone please point me in some direction?
NOTE: I'm still doing research at the moment, so I've got nothing holding me back at this point.

There is an API plugin that has been developed to spit out information in JSON, but I have not actually implemented a site with it:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/json-api/
Perhaps you could have the authors work on a wordpress install and create your app to draw content via that plugin?

I too was facing the same issue, little different. We want to have WP as CMS so that our site can take the benefit of SEO which is very easy with WP. SO we installed WP under a folder in the Main ASP.net based website. Initially there were issues, I was unable to run it. Finally managed to run it. Solution is posted here - http://www.wwwlabz.com/how-to-run-a-php-based-website-from-a-subfolder-in-asp-net-website. Hope it will help someone. Actual site where we implemented this is http://www.periproperties.com/content/.
Now I want to have specific section of WP to be accessible on my site. SO I am exploring different options and will post, if found something
Thanks.

DotNetNuke is the most popular ASP.NET based CMS (source). I am implementing my first project in it and so far I am very happy with it.
Note the free edition will not work for you since you need customizable security roles and free has a limited set of predetermined roles. You'll need the pro edition.
I don't know how similar it is to WordPress. Overall, WordPress is much more popular but of course there are platform issues with WordPress since it is Apache based and you want to create an ASP.NET website.

Related

Building a website for a hotel - is WordPress the best idea?

I'm researching to see if building a full website for a hotel be a good idea to do on WordPress.
I read that wordpress is okay but there are better options.
I want to design and code my own front end look to the website, but have the backend on a stable platform that can take all the reservations seamlessly.
My main concern is to be able to have a backup of all the files and easily switch to another server in case something goes wrong.
I can host the website on my server or host with the service you suggest that comes with the platform all together.
Any ideas and/or suggestions are greatly appreciated!
There are other options, no doubt, but yes, it can and is really possible to build it using WordPress as CMS.
If you want to design and code your own theme, you'll need to study the WordPress Theme Structure and, since you'll build it by yourself, you'll also need to develop plugins to create custom post types (aka CPT) to make the hotel management easier on the WP back-end.
About the theme structure, files, child themes and everything, I'd recommend you to read https://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
About the plugins development: https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/
About Custom Post Types: https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/post-types/registering-custom-post-types/
About the backup: it's super easy and you can even make a full backup using free plugins via back-end. But if the site goes down you can easily do it via FTP downloading only wp-content folder and the database. It's really simple to migrate from one WordPress to another, or from host to host.
About the hosting, you'll need to use a server if you want to build this project. There's a difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org
The .com is simpler, you are not able to build everything you want. The .org is the open source project, which you get the files, upload to your server and connect to database (MariaDB or MySQL). Most hosts offer automatic installation for WordPress and, from there, you can change whatever you want and need.
Note: many developers create CPTs INSIDE the theme's code, but this is not recommended by WP as you can see in We recommend that you put custom post types in a plugin rather than a theme. This ensures that user content remains portable even if they change their theme.
WP is not really hard, after 1 week studying you'll see yourself getting over most difficulties. Even if it takes longer, don't give up. There's a huge community to help you with WP questions.
Hope it helps and I'm sorry my bad writing, I'm not an english native speaker.
C ya

WordPress Permissions Roles Manager?

I´m currently developing the Intranet for the company I am working for. The site is currently based on SharePoint, but I have to migrate it to Wordpress. And that´s my first developer experience with Wordpress, you just should know. Creating the theme, content and working with the WP Admin area works very well, but where I´m feeling defenseless is the permissions topic.
Generally, the whole page content is managed by the Marketing department. So, for me it is ok that they have access to WP Admin and I would use one of the predefined roles available.
But there will be also an area for the departments where specified users per department should be able to
edit the pre created page content
add subpages and edit its content (it would be nice if it can be defined which page templates can be selected by the user)
add posts for a pre created category (that should not be changeable by the user)
edit its profile and password
A whole access to WP Admin should be therefore prevented.
I read much information about roles, capabilities and reviewed forums and blogs presenting potential plugins. But to be honest, I´ve lost the overview and I´m totally scared about what´s the right way to do such like this the professional way.
Is there anybody who was already in such a situation or knows a good resource where to read more?
Thanks a lot.
John
PressPermit is the tool I choosed. It covers all needs described in my question.
Note: To use all features, you need to buy a support subscription currently available for $55 a year for one site.
However, a very powerful tool and in comparison to Advanced Access Manager I tried before, it really supports permissions also for multiple roles.
If you are thinking about, use the screencasts to see if the tool cover your needs. Unfortunately, there is no trial available, but you can request an evolution wordpress installation which was setup within one day in my case. This service costs $5.

Which CMS should I use when I hand a website over to my non-techie friend?

I'm designing a simple website for a friend - four static pages to advertise a yoga retreat she is running. I have a couple of requirements:
My time is short; I want to quickly build a theme template.
She has no technical skills; she wants to log in to the backend and update page content.
Working for myself, a static site builder such as nanoc or jekyll would be ideal: I can build a template.html with room for some content, then update content files, rebuild the site and redeploy. As a bonus, the whole site could be hosted free on GitHub pages. This satisfies requirement (1) but not requirement (2).
I've also considered Wordpress, because I've got plenty of experience running WP sites and developing custom themes. This satisfies requirement (2) but not (1). There is simply too much development overhead building a WP theme - it is not straightforward to modify the markup structure of all those template files, and there are plenty of snags involving ugly page titles or "Comments are disabled" strings which need to be removed.
It shouldn't be this difficult. I want a site engine which has a simple template.html file for easy re-theming, and an accessible backend for content changes. Bonus points if free hosting is available somewhere.
Perch - http://www.grabaperch.com - is made for this sort of thing, though it's not free (£).
Could you hack a site together using tumblr pages?
What about Google Sites? Dead simple.
If you're open to .NET i think you should look at n2cms.
WordPress using a premium theme bought in any of the many sites offering quite nice themes for a reasonable price (60 USD). Then, you just change the logo and ready to go.
Since I'm not a web designer myself, this is what I´ve done myself for my sites and I´m quite happy with the results

Architecture ideas to allow customers to build their own site, based off external site's data?

I'm not entirely sure how to properly ask this, so please bear with me.
I have an idea for a site I would like to build, which would basically be a site for members to create some data and have it housed in my database. I would like to offer a value-add to the site which would allow people to spin off their own website via my own "website builder" tool (probably some sort of CMS). Their website would be able to communicate with my master database to display their data.
Getting down to the crux of the topic, I'm looking for architectural advice/ideas/etc. regarding what services I could use to do this. I'm not looking a 100% automated solution, but something along these lines (which may not be completely correct, I admit):
Customer puts in an order to create their own site, using my tools.
I setup a separate domain for them, roll out the CMS foundation to the site, and the customer has full editing control of the CMS to design it however they would like.
The CMS would have some customizations so that it includes functionality to call APIs located on the master site, which would return the relevant data.
In the research I have done on SO, I've seen a lot of mentions of Umbraco which honestly looks like a good start. I'm just worried that when I go to upgrade a version, I have to deal with overwriting my custom API functionality. I'm guessing this is the nature of the beast, and requires me to accept/plan for it.
Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Some high-level starting points? Thanks!
I've been thinking about this same issue for my customers.
It is not hard to automatically roll out a stock cms such as Wordpress or Joomla. This sort of thing is done all the time by "1 click installers" that DreamHost and others have.
Including custom widgets or plugins for the CMS that can connect to your main app is also not hard.
For dns, you can use Amazon Route 53 or other DNS services that include a good api at the dns management level.
I suggest that you focus on using a CMS that is very popular (eg Wordpress or Joomla) rather than something less well known such as Umbraco. Using a more popular system will drastically reduce your training costs--remember that if you supply the CMS to your customers, then they'll also expect you to supply the support for it...

Joomla Blog/Wordpress Integration

I'm looking for a wordpress-like blog interface to put inside a Joomla hosted site. The admin interface of Joomla is quirky enough and hard enough to use that daily updates are infeasible.
What I am looking for is an easy-to-use posting interface that supports multiple users with different accounts/names, a tagging scheme, and easy find by date/user/tag functionality.
In particular I'm looking for a relatively easy-to-deploy, out-of-the-box solution, and would prefer not to hack rss feeds together or write too much custom code. I know there are several extensions out there but they all receive largely mixed reviews... Has anyone used any of these? Or has anyone had experience putting something like this together?
Well you could do this - have a wordpress installation. Get the users to post there and then use the RSS feed from it (or the XML RPC Blogging API) to update the Joomla installation. You will have to write the update piece once, but then all the headache is gone.
I'm not trying to be smart here, but if the admin interface of Joomla isn't working for you, aren't you doing yourself a disservice by trying to patch their UI instead of spending your time looking for a CMS that is easier to manage/a better fit for your user base?
Edit: All of the CMS's I've dealt with in ASP.NET are homegrown. However I'm looking into checking out Umbraco based on the recommendations of two well-respected friends. In the case you presented where you already have content in Joomla and a migration out to another CMS is going to be overkill, I think that vaibhav has got it right. You should look into setting up Wordpress or some other blogging engine and then simply have Joomla consume the content and display it in the Joomla site. I've not done it, but from what I remember of Joomla when I was looking at it, I believe that it would support this.
After doing a bit more research I decided to go with the open source MojoBlog. It was quite easy to install and configure and after a few stalls and hang ups that were resolved via perusal of their forums I was up and running. The edit interface is not ideal but it much better than Joomla admin, and it has multi-user-support, tag categorization, modules for viewing by tag, date, etc. Think it will suffice for my needs in the short term.
We at 'corePHP' have successfully integrated the WordPress and WordPress Multi-User blogging platforms into Joomla!. Please visit us to see what these feature-rich components have to offer you. https://www.corephp.com/wordpress/wordpress-integration-for-joomla-1.5.html
Happy Blogging,
Michael Pignataro
VP of Operations
www.corephp.com

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