<
location path="trace.axd">
<
system.web>
<
authorization>
<
allow roles="Admins"/>
<
deny users="*"/>
</
authorization>
</
system.web>
</
location>
Anyway, you can see why this kind of plug-in can be very powerful. One of the best sample applications out there which demonstrates many best practices for this kind of application development is ELMAH, or Error Logging Modules and Handlers [gotdotnet] [author home]. Read that article if you’re considering writing your own plugin.
Using this approach, I created a Cache Manager plugin last year. This was my first foray into a real world application using these techniques. The result is a very simple plugin that provides cache management functionality to any ASP.NET web site (1.x or 2.0). You can download AspAlliance.CacheManager for free.
Enough background though – this post is about a CMS tool.
AspAlliance.SimpleCms – A Simple CMS Application Plugin (NOT a CMS Application!)
Earlier this year while I was updating AspAlliance.com I found myself wishing there were an easy way for me to simply edit certain pages with my site’s look and feel without having to migrate my site over to some mammoth CMS application (of which there are many) or portal/community application with CMS as a feature. I asked around to see if anybody I knew had something like this – nobody did, but several were wishing for the same thing. I talked to some component vendors and CMS application builders, and none of them had anything that fit what I wanted, either. So in the end I decided to build it. I talked with Dave Wanta, who was also interested in such a tool, and came up with some specs, and about a month ago I started Brendan, one of my interns, (with 0 ASP.NET knowledge when he began in May) on the task.
Brendan blogged about the tool a couple of times. It’s now very close to complete. Hopefully in the next day or two I’ll have a live version running on AspAlliance.com. The basic idea for the application is that it should be a plugin that requires no code changes in the host application, just some configuration to set things up (wiring up the modules and handlers, and adding the CMS config section). With just that, it should then allow the administrator to list all pages, edit individual pages, enable/disable pages under the CMS’s control. It allows any arbitrary path to be used for the content under its control, and this is configured within the web.config. For instance, SimpleCMS might be set up to manage *.cmsx or /cms/*.aspx. Each page will simply be a blog of HTML that is placed within a content region which is in turn wrapped by a user-configured Master page (or header and footer ASCX controls), allowing for a common look and feel. The system will also define the page’s filename, keywords, description, title, etc, allowing for a search engine optimized final result.
We still have a few more bugs to work out before we release a public beta, but I’ll be dogfooding it on some new areas of AspAlliance.com very soon. If you have a wish list of features, please add your comments and I’ll see what I can do.