ASP.NET Simple CMS

Question

I have an existing ASP.NET web site. The site has a "news" section and I'd like to add some very simple content management functionality to that an administrator can edit the news.

I had thought of using DotNetNuke.

• Is this a sensible option?
• Any pointers for adding this simple functionality?
• Should I look at another solution?

Answer 1

Recently we had the same requirement and we did this way

1) Created XML files on a separate box like a separate server it self.

2) Wrote api in net to read xml files and html files and display on asp.net

3) The business access the xml files directly and modify the contents

4) Then can always modify the content and get a preview in QA or staging.

5) We thought of going for third party CMS , but we have to change the complete website.

6) The approach we are using is working pretty fine.

Let me know if you need any more info , with this approach you can save money and you and your business will have full control

Answer 2

There are a number of .Net CMSs to choose from

• DotNetNuke
• Umbraco
• orchard Project

To name but a few. If you are going to be building websites regularly pick one adn learn it well. A CMS will save you a lot of time in the long run.

Answer 3

a complete cms (which you have to maintain and manage) seems a little overkill i think.

when you see the news messages as a simple list, you can make a simple CRUD screen for it in which you can set the visibility, showdate, enddate etc. just like any other list of items (clients, accounts, orders).

for editing the (html)content you can use the ckeditor control; with that the admin user can type any html he/she wants.

storage can be done in the database if you already use one, or in a simple database (sql server CE) or in xml if you want.