ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development (Paperback)

~ Curt Christianson (Author), Jeff Cochran (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Build, Manage, and Extend your own Content Management System

• Create your own Content Management System with the understanding needed to expand it and add new functionality as your needs grow
• Learn to build a fully functional application with very little code and set up users and groups within your application
• Manage the layout of your site using Master Pages, Content Placeholders, Themes, Regions, and Zones
• A step-by-step guide with plenty of code snippets and screen images

In Detail

ASP.NET 3.5 is equipped with a built-in security system, standard design templates, and easy configurations for database connections, which make it the ideal language for building a content management system. With the strong community support for the ASP.NET platform, you can be assured that what you write today will be around and supported for years to come. You can imagine how easy it is to get lost in the myriad features especially if you are a newcomer.

This book shows you how to make use of ASP.NET's features and create a functional Content Management System quickly and conveniently. You will learn how to build your site and see the different ways in which you can customize your code to fit your needs. With this book in hand, you can easily set up users and groups, create valuable content for your users, and manage the layout of your site efficiently. All you need is a basic understanding of coding and a desire to learn, and this book will take care of the rest.

This book will teach you to get your site up and running quickly, and maintain its content even if you have little or no web design or programming experience. It will give you all the knowledge you need to use the tools as well as the code required to make yourself a strong developer far beyond your site. It begins with setting up your programming environment and coding a Content Management System. You will learn how to install and configure a database and connect it to your CMS. You will be able to create content and manage the layout of your site, and also make it available beyond the browser. At the end of this book, you will have designed and built a CMS that allows you to administer an Articles section, Images and Files sections, as well as a full set of Administrator tools for your site.

What you will learn from this book?

• Set up your programming environment and jump right into coding a completely functional Content Management System
• Install and configure a database and connect it to your Content Management System
• Learn all about n-tier architecture and how it can work within Content Management Systems
• Set up users and groups within your application and learn about the management tools
• Create and manage valuable content within your site for the users and learn how to make it available beyond the browser
• Learn all about Master Pages, Content Placeholders, Themes/Skins, and managing the layout of your site
• Begin digging into site navigation and looking into the concepts of inheritance
• Use Administrator privileges to manage your site from a single point

Approach

This step-by-step tutorial shows the reader how to build an ASP.NET Content Management System from scratch. You will first learn the basics of a content management system and how to set up the tools you need to build your site. Then, you start building your site, setting up users, and adding content to your site. You will be able to edit the content of your site and also manage its layout all by yourself. Towards the end, you will learn to manage your site from a single point and will have all the information you need to extend your site to make it more powerful.

Filled with plenty of code snippets and screen images to keep you on track as well as numerous additional samples to show you all the exciting alternatives to explore, this book prepares you for all the challenges you can face in development.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for beginner to intermediate ASP.NET users who have managed to learn Visual Web Developer and want to take on their first real-world application. It will help those who have used SQL Server Express, completed a few sample projects, and now wish to explore a Content Management System.

About the Author

Curt Christianson

Curt Christianson has been involved in the tech community since the mid 1990s and has been a professional developer for more than a decade. He is an active community contributor on the Asp.net forums as well as a Forum Moderator. He is currently in his 6th Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award cycle for his work with ASP/ASP.Net. He is writing a number of open source add-ins and Starter Kits. He's based in Wisconsin, U.S.A. as a professional developer as well as contributing to books and articles, both printed and on the Internet.

Curt is in the process of entering into the life of a married man thanks to his better half Jessyca. They plan on settling down with lots of little ones running around, providing the mosquitoes don't carry them all off first or the winter chill doesn't get them.

Jeff Cochran

Jeff Cochran is a Senior Network Specialist for the City of Naples, Florida. A large part of his job includes web design and coding, as well as web server management. Jeff has nearly two decades of experience with the Internet, having started one of the first Internet Service Providers in Southwest Florida, and has worked with Windows and Unix-based web servers. Now primarily concentrating on Windows technologies, Jeff has been a Microsoft MVP for Microsoft's Internet Information Server for nearly a decade and is active in the ASP Classic and ASP.NET communities as well.

Jeff has been married for twenty years to Zina, a graphic designer and, according to most accounts, the driving force that keeps him focused on... Oh look - A Pony! In the off-hours, Jeff and Zina spend much of their time remodeling a 1950s bungalow in Naples, Florida, trying to keep the rain out and the cats in. Jeff also has a long-term addiction to classic pinball machines, tropical fish, and off-road vehicles, all of which compete with home repairs for a share of his income.

Product Details

• Paperback: 284 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (June 25, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847193617
• ISBN-13: 978-1847193612
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #187,556 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Perfect ASP.NET practical guide for beginners, November 13, 2009

By	Basel Alkhateeb - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I started from a Drupal background about CMS and I wanted to make something in ASP.NET but I wanted something to show me quickly what ASPX has to offer... and this book was great for this job.

It took me one week to finish this book and it's really a great start for any one who wishes to learn ASP.NET by example really fast.

beside giving you a good background about almost everything ASP.NET has to offer out of the box it teaches you the concepts of CMS.


This book really saved my graduation project.
thanks for the author for his crystal clear explanation.

I gave it 4 out of 5 because it missed three basic concepts that are standards in today's CMSs.
1. dynamic menu system.
2. Internationalization (multi language support).
3. dynamic Regions and zones and the ability to assign the content to specific regions.

2.0 out of 5 stars Extremely Basic, October 9, 2009

By	A Developer - See all my reviews

While I appreciate that a CMS is a complex beast, there's some real depth missing in this book. The CMS built could be easily compressed to one chapter as it's basically a bare-bones version. It's useful to keep it simple for instructional purposes, but it doesn't cover things a modern CMS benefits from (things like a drag-and-drop site tree and so on).

If you're new to .NET or a CMS is an entirely new type of program for you, then you can learn from this. If you know Forms Authentication, basic SQL Server administration and how to create a page to display text from a database, you may want to look elsewhere for instruction.

It's not a poorly-written book; it just doesn't prep you for a real-world CMS application's requirements.

4.0 out of 5 stars Example-driven tutorial, August 19, 2009

By	Maarten Balliauw (Belgium) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ok, it is true: this book will show you how to build a content management system in ASP.NET 3.5. However, if you are a developer working with ASP.NET for several years and the CMS part is the reason you are buying this book, you will be a bit disappointed. Don't get me wrong, the book is good for another audience: if you are making your first steps in ASP.NET development and want to learn how things like datasources, n-tier development, membership provider, extensibility, ... work, by example, this book is actually pretty good at that. Curt and Jeff managed to squeeze in about all commonly used ASP.NET features using only one example application that is built from ground up.

Conclusion: probably not the book for experienced developers, but an ideal "large, example-driven tutorial" for beginning development with ASP.NET 3.5.