Introduction

Designing and coding a complete ASP.NET CMS from scratch may, at times, be the only choice we have for specialised sites. It can be near impossible to understand previously written CMSs to the extent needed to modify them, usually because of poor documentation.

The following “How To’s” will be linked to MSDN Sample Gallery Solutions so that you can see the code in detail and manipulate it as you like. The articles themselves will give you more documentation than you will ever really need.

Developing a full CMS takes teams of developers’ years to provide all the bells and whistles that modern CMS provide. As a result, do not expect that this CMS will be on a par with them. The CMS design model I will be adopting is the Joomla model which is one of the most popular PHP based CMS available. Not only is Joomla well designed, giving us an advantage of having someone spend years working on producing such a great design; but it also means that most users will be familiar with our CMS as soon as they see it!

We will program using a code first system, where we build the features of the CMS as we progress through the development of the CMS; this includes the database design.

Requirements

You will need the following to follow this How To.

1. Any Visual Studio 2010 or better version (Visual Studio Website)
2. Nova 5 HTML Template (Download)
3. Administrator's Template (Medialoot)

Table Of Contents

Creating the Views.

Using Open Source templates we will re-design the HTML & CSS templates into Master Pages, so our CMS can use professionally pre-designed templates.

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   Information Required: Does anyone know if the VS Express editions has a built in ASP.NET development server?