We have a fairly large project that will get a redesign and we want to introduce Umbraco as CMS.
First off i have 0 (zero) experience and my Co devs also have only basic experience with Umbraco.
The lead Dev decided we keep our Users(Frontend) only in our own DB and therefore write a Custom MembershipProvider and Member Service.
I was assigned that Task and after researching i feel this is not the way to go, finding no resources at all covering that topic.
What is the preferred way to use existing users in a new Umbraco installation?
Br
It's not difficult to write a custom membership provider and personally I don't particularly like the member interface in Umbraco but if that's the way to go for you then the CMSImport package works well (license required - 99 euros). We've used it in the past and it was very straightforward.
Here is the project page https://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/cmsimport
Wing
Related
(My apologies for all those that voted the question down. I'm not trying to avoid researching. I've been actually trying to find a way for doing this for the past several hours. The only thing I'm trying to avoid is paying the Umbraco TV membership fee)
This is probably a dumb question:
I'm somewhat familiar with MVC, but really new to UMBRACO 7. I'm going through documentation on how to add restricted pages (pages accesible to some membership types) and I have to create a model. I've been searching through the whole UMBRACO settings and developer back office pages but couldn't find where to add the models. Neither was I able to find in VS where to add them (which would be even more convenient).
Can someone point me in the right direction or any documentation where I would be able to understand how Umbraco and MVC+VS work together and add models and custom code to an UMBRACO 7 website?
(I have the site running locally in VS2013 and DB in MSSQL Server 2014)
THANK YOU KINDLY!
I would recommend you read up on Umbraco surface controllers. You can learn a bit about what it is and how it works here: http://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Reference/Mvc/surface-controllers
To answer your question, you put your models where you always put model classes in MVC: Pretty much where ever you like in the solution. However, it would be pretty good idea to put it in a folder & namespace called Models.
When I want to restrict access to pages in my umbraco site, I usually find that I can use the default "Public Access" that umbraco has set up. Just right click on a node in the content tree, and you should be able to restrict access to either specific members or a specific member groups.
https://our.umbraco.org/wiki/reference/umbraco-client/context-menus/public-access
At the moment I am building a big project using:
ASP.Net MVC 4
jQuery (With some extra libraries)
Castle ActiveRecord (based on NHibernate)
Implemented users and roles using .Net Membership Provider
I built almost all the website, but some very relevant parts are missing still and I noticed that this CMS supports
ASP.Net MVC and NHibernate, and have almost all the features that I need already implemented.
The features that I still need to implement are:
Internal Search Engine
Comments
Version of content
Chat betwwen users
Users Profiles Page (Something like a very basic social network)
Forum
SEO
I don't know if is harder to use the CMS or if is better to add the features one by one manually.
I am worried about the time I spend learning and adapting to Orchard is the same time I would spent adding this
features manually.
Basically, the question is:
Should I move my solution to Orchard CMS or add everything manually ?
You can't just move your solution to Orchard, you could but i won't recommend it. Orchard is still MVC 3 at the base and that way most should work if you just move your solution including the database etc. But if you ask me, spending time to add the features manually is the way u should go.
In the Orchard Galery you can find existing many modules
Internal Search Engine
Lucene (Fully functional - Writen by the Orchard Team)
Comments
Already exists in the Orchard Core Module
Version of content
Already exists in the Orchard Framework functionalty
Users Profiles Page
Profile (Fully functional? Or at least good enough as example)
SEO
Several modules
Only 2 features u will have to write yourself
Chat between users
I can't find any example code for this, but I know Piotr Szmyd has tested SignalR inside a Orchard Module which, I think, will be usefull for a Chat module. Demo is here.
Forum
Nicholas Mayne made a start of a forum module which can be used as example or starting point, maybe you can help him extent it? Currently it's sort of a pre-alpha version :(
+1 to rfcdejon's answer. I ported my current project to Orchard after at 50-60% complete. I wish I had done it sooner due to the learning curve and time to integrate all the stuff I had already written, but overall it was the right choice.
If you have significant data already set up you should account for the extra time it will take to port that into Orchard. But if you are making an app from scratch with very little existing data that would make the switch to Orchard easier. Orchard is a great choice for anyone looking for a .NET CMS that supports MVC.
Some things to keep in mind:
Features you've already built will have to be converted into Orchard content types/parts in order to take advantage of things that come out of the box with Orchard, like search, comments, versioning, etc.
Orchard has its own users/roles system, so you might have to do some work to find a module for what you're already using, or override Orchard's user/membership system yourself.
Your entire app will have to become an Orchard app, and your existing MVC stuff will have to convert into an Orchard module. Existing data access code will have to be wrapped inside a using (new TransactionScope(TransactionScopeOption.Suppress)) {...}
Forums project has started but isn't done, so you will either be banking that it will finish in time for you to use it, or that you will be able to help get it working.
Lot's (if not most) of the current Web frameworks provide an admin module for basic CRUD operations, but I find the ones I know usually very limited...
So, my question is, which Web framework out there provide the best administration backend?
By the best, I mean namely:
Domain objects that can be heavily polymorphic. Attributes/relations defined in a class appear when editing a record/instance of any of it's subclasses (and sub-subclasses, and sub-sub-subclasses, etc).
Abstract classes. It's ok to have abstract classes anywhere in the domain classes' hierarchy. Their attributes and relations also show in the records/instances of all descending classes.
Relations. Allow to edit (out-of-the-box) the records/instances that have many-to-many relations, and relations with associative classes (e.g., django calls these intermediate models)
Extension. Allow to extend the admin so that we can use our own "UI controls" for specific domain objects. Some information is just too "exquisite" for an out-of-the-box form-based control to work in a suitable way.
UI Components. Instead of having to choose between using all of it or none of it, it'd be nice to have generic "UI controls" that one could reuse from within any page of the website, to edit specific domain objects.
Programming language is not an issue at this point, although I lean towards the languages (or frameworks) that allow me to express the most information at the domain model level (and that the admin module can then use to give me a richer UI).
I've been playing with Active Admin and Rails Admin for a couple of Rails 3.1 projects I am working on. While both are nice, I've migrated more and more to Rails Admin. I've found it easy to customize, it does a very nice job with associated models, and has a great default UI.
Rails Admin
Definitely good old WebObjects with it rule system called DirectToWeb. It generates everything at runtime based on rules. By default it can display all your entity's properties and relationships.
I guess that every current web framework will offer something like scaffolding, but often times, the work begins as soon as you change your model.
Check out this post and this teaser about the latest DirectToWeb-based framework, ERModern. You use nearly zero code for what you see in the video and you can build entire applications around it. It was sponsored by the iTunes team.
Edit for your bullet points:
Abstract classes and domain objects that can be heavily polymorphic - You handle these using rules.
Editing relations - No problem, it only depends on the design of your components. If you use ERModern, you get this for free.
Generic UI components - This is exactly how DirectToWeb works. You use (or define your own) generic components that display themselves according to the current entity (an object inheriting from EOEnterpriseObject) and the rules that fired for the current state (the D2WContext, essentially a big dictionary).
You can see all of this in action in the 45 minutes long ERModern Intro Video.
This isn't an easy question to answer.
You never specify what language you want to use, and you named some features, but how much of these features do you want.
I mean I could suggest a number of frameworks and tools for ASP.Net MVC or Web Forms but what if you're a PHP developer or a Java developer?
I could suggest SharePoint (and I generally dislike sharepoint, but everything you want is in SharePoint), but then the question to ask is.
How much flexibility and freedom do you want to customize or how much do you want the framework to do and you just be a code monkey.
So I will give you just my opinion.
I use ASP.Net MVC for my custom apps. It does all of what you want and allows me the most freedom to create and extend with tools if I so to do so. Plus out of the box there's a user databse with roles I can easily create out of the boss once I run the app for the first time.
Also CRUD is completely easy and straight forward out of the box. just check it out http://www.asp.net/mvc there's a tutorial section that goes through what you're wanting that you could complete in half a day.
Then there are some OR/M like NHibernate, Entity Framework, Subsonic use www.google.com to find tutorials for these if you're not familiar with them.
Then there's SharePoint it has a learning curve but once you get past it it's pretty straight forward as it's easy to pinpoint bugs, focus on the business logic and not worry aobut data base schema (as you don't even need to touch a database).
I love WebObjects.
WebObjects -> EntityModeler -> Wonder -> ERD2WModernLook -> ERAttachment --> ERRest
Bam. Done.
I'm investigating technologies to build a commercial SaS site for a shop that predominantly uses Microsoft technologies.
The idea is that the site will have pluggable modules, with features that are either free or paid. Customers will be able to chop & change between features, & have their billing adjusted automagically as they do so.
If I were rolling this myself, I'd use:
.NET 4 / VS2010 / C# / ReSharper / NUnit / Moq
NDependencyInjection
SQL Server
LINQ to SQL
ASP.NET MVC 3
Authorize.net (or possibly billing hand-off to SAP)
Selenium
... and hand-roll an IOC-based plugin architecture (e.g., there is some good discussion on ASP.NET MVC plugins here and here).
But at this point I'm wondering - has this been done before? I'm imagining some sort of vaguely CMS-like architecture with built-in plug-in, commerce & subscription stuff. All of that, rolled up into an 'off the shelf' solution, either FOSS or commercial.
Can anyone recommend such a solution, or is it simply a 'roll your own' job? I think DotNetNuke might be worth looking at, but would appreciate feedback from people who've used it in production for this sort of task.
Edited to add: DotNetNuke appears set on continuing with WebForms, which is a big turn-off for me at least. As one of the commenters on that post said, it's an evolutionary dead-end.
Edited again: Silverlight is definitely out for this project. We need to support a wide range of devices, including non-Microsoft mobile devices like Android and iOS tablets & phones. We do need a reasonably rich UI but we'll be doing that in Javascript.
For a project which needed plugable modules, I've used MEF (which comes built in to .net 4.0).
By using this great code for compiling views into a dll it was easy to use MEF to load additional views and controllers making extensability easy.
The only other thing i'd do differently to your suggestments is to use Linq to Entites rather than Linq to Sql. The latest code-first version makes it very quick to get things up and running
Martin
I've done a similar solution for a VOIP PBX solution. I've made everything myself using nhibernate, autofac and a couple of own libraries. It's not really different from doing a normal application.
The most important aspect you need to understand is that ALL modules are loaded at ALL time. Theres no way around that if you need a solution that works well (you could jungle with one app domain per customer but that's not very inefficient).
You should instead control authorization using the standard .NET CAS (Code Access Security) solution. You do this by creating your own IPrincipal and IIdentity. The principal should correspond the tenant (organization) while IPrincipal corresponds to the user.
I use a ITenantEntity interface (contains the tenant db id) on all of my classes/entities which should belong to a tenant. It's used to validate that the currently logged on user really have access to the entity requested.
The hardest thing is if your application is multithreading (for instance if you got a background thread or timer doing some maintenance). The reasons is that it's quite easy to forget to switch to the correct IPrincipal which makes all your CAS checks fuck up. The easiest way to go around that is to create a custom Timer and Thread classes which forces you to specify a IPrincipal (or at least makes it easy to switch).
Another common approach is to use the tenantId argument on all service / repository methods. But that isn't a very robust solution imho.
Why would anyone roll these in an 'off the shelf' solution?
These parts of the architecture are quite independent and you can substitute for whatever suits your needs.
Introduction:
Now I know this question could be very broad and it would be too hard to answer without me asking something specific. So All I ask is just some direction, or a brief high level explanation of a design, or maybe there is already some framework out there that could help me get started...I'm not sure.. I have never designed a plugin architecture before, so maybe there is some resource/example you could point me to on the web that would help me learn so that I may come up with my own solution.
Details of my question:
My intention is I would like to create a plug-in architecture for a new pet-project that I am building in ASP.NET MVC.
I would like to design it so that it has some sort of plug-in ability for all, or at least most, of the application's components.
The reason I would like to do this, is so that I may be able to do deployments with nearly zero down time. The idea is that when I want to deploy the latest version I would drop in the new DLLs into a specific folder, and the application would load up the new plug ins and that is it.
For exapmle, lets say I add a new "contacts" feature to my web application where users can search, add and delete contacts. I would like to be able to deploy that by way of plugins.
Is something like this even possible for Web Applications? Or am I just dreaming?
It's definitely possible.
You will need to define a pretty comprehensive interface that represents everything your plugins will have to do. You should approach it by differentiating what is "core" to your application, and where the extensibility points are. For example, where will the plugins be accessed? Will they be tabs on a page, or links in a sidebar? What properties does each plugin need to have in order to fit into the plugin container?
Generally, plugins are enumerated via reflection by looking for assemblies that implement the plugin interface.
Just for encouragement, we've done this with an enterprise product that provides a generic framework for "management" interfaces for web sites. Developers just need to drop in a plugin dll that builds specific property pages, and they show up in the management interface menu, all the navigation is taken care of, and their dll's just have to worry about their own domain logic.
There is always the dll-way where you define some interfaces that plugins follow.
But for web application, especially ASP.NET MVC, you need a controller, views and so. Probably these can be included in a dll file using prepared controller factory to handle that, but it would be hard to develop these plugins.
Some inspiration for code (or db) embedded content: Haacked about that
ASP.NET MVC version 2 will support areas, where you can put some parts of the application into different folders within the app. This way you can just upload some files and the app will recognize these new files. Read more there Haacked blog
PS: I found another person here on S.O. asking the same question as me:
Plug-in architecture for ASP.NET MVC It might be useful for someone researching the same topic.