I'm curious to know if any basic CMS code has been written for ASP.NET MVC.
The reason I ask is, I'm making a data-driven website for a client, and I've already spent a significant amount of time building it from the ground-up in MVC, but now the client wants content management facilities.
Basically they want to be able to add/edit/remove articles and have revision control.
It would be great if I could somehow 'bolt on' the content management without having to start again from scratch, developing it under an existing CMS.
Should I build the article management and revision control myself, or should I re-use some existing package?
N2 does what you describe - "bolts on" to existing ASP.NET solutions (including MVC).
Also, kooboo is interesting http://www.kooboo.com
(I know this question is old, but it still comes high up for the relevant search terms.)
Today I discovered Meek, http://www.adventuretechgroup.com/labs-meek/, and it was very simple and unobtrusive to add to my MVC project, which I believe is what the original poster would have wanted - bolting on CMS as a feature rather than having it take over your entire site.
Piranha CMS is well suited to bolting on to an existing application. The author of it describes why and how here. To quote straight from that source:
"Our focus is content management and to have a transparent and lightweight API for developers. Piranha CMS has almost no components or helpers that render any HTML at all, it simply provides a database, a manager interface and a routing mechanism for retrieving the correct data for the current request.
In the case of you having an existing website you could actually bypass the routing completely, add one page at a time in the manager interface and then manually load the Page model in you existing page. This would allow you to keep your original application exactly the same but manage the content form the manager interface."
If you are still looking, I've published my new open source CMS here:
MVCwCMS
I'm actively working on it so I will push more updates soon.
Here is also a quick summary as to how Telerik Sitefinity does it:
http://www.sitefinity.com/mvc-cms
in brief - allows you to plug in standard system.web.mvc.controller classes as widgets, lets you use the API for anything including model binding, standard Razor for a view engine etc.
There is also Oxite which I believe is more of a blog engine.
Heve a look at AtomicCms it's a free open source content management system based on ASP.NET MVC 1.0
http://atomiccms.codeplex.com
Check for Orchard ;-)
It is based on asp.net mvc.
Related
I am thinking of using upshot.js along with Knockout in one of my very important projects. I do not see any documentation or any activity around upshot. Before I commit to this decision, is this project still active?
If the entire asp.net stack is now open and one can see what is getting committed to repository, why this small library is still not on codeplex or github for community to see?
I hope this is still on radar of asp.net team.
According to this blog post, Upshot is officially dead:
http://www.riaservicesblog.net/Blog/post/WCF-RIA-Services-is-Dead-Long-Live-WCF-RIA-Services.aspx
The author points to BreezeJS as an alternative:
http://www.breezejs.com
Upshot is officially dead.
"Earlier this year the Beta version of Visual Studio 2012 included a template that was designed for building “single page applications” using Upshot.js and a special Web API-based DataController that provided support for insert, update, and delete operations using the unit of work pattern with transaction support. We are not currently continuing work on that template or Upshot.js. We want to first focus on improving the development experience with existing popular JavaScript libraries and in future versions we will revisit this decision and see if additional libraries are needed to round out the SPA experience."
http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Roadmap
Give a shot to JayData at http://jaydata.org, it has JavaScript Language Query and JavaScript CRUD capabilities with change tracking, batches and a lot more. What it offers over BreezeJS is its provider agnostic architecture and a number of providers that you can use out of the box: OData, webSQL, IndexedDB, localStore, Facebook and YQL.
JayData plays nicely with NodeJS and let you consume OData from a JavaScript based middletier.
Also you can use JayData not only to consume but also to provide OData if you are using it on the server side with NodeJS and mongoDB.
The ASP.NET team haven't finished the official release of ASP.NET SPA in time to ship with the final ASP.NET MVC 4 release but they are still working on it.
You can find the source code for ASP.NET SPA and follow the development effort on the ASP.NET CodePlex site:
ASP.NET SPA Source Code (to look at the upshot stuff click Browse and expand src/SPA/upshot
ASP.NET SPA Discussions
The general lack of documentation is caused by the fact that there haven't be an official release yet.
Speaking for my company - we used exactly the same combination (Knockout + Upshot) and after sweating a lot of blood, we decided to get rid of Upshot and replace it with JQuery's ajax calls. Much more transparent and much more bugfree. However, much more code, too.
Back in February the authors of Upshot promised they would put documentation on in a week or so and since then I've heard nothing of them. If you want my opinion, I think this project has already been buried or indefinitely postponed.
Accodding to what is said on the discussions(see http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/discussions/topics/5321/asp-net-single-page-application) on SPA, the whole SPA strategy would change, so I think the final version o SPA or whatever will replace it will be quite different from the actual bits...so I don't know if it is a good move continuing using the actual version...that at my bets knowledge is not compatible with Mvc 4 RTM.
I am the author of the Mvc Controls Toolkit there we implemented some js functions to help querying OData, and to update entitiess that are on the client side. They handle validation errors(both client side and server side), return to client principal keys created on the server, do changes tracking (to send to the server just changed entities) and allows undoing changes done on the client side. They handle also one to many relations. Moreover, updates are handled not only with WebApi controllers but also with normal controllers.
Give a look to this first tutorial: http://dotnet-programming.com/post/2012/04/03/Mvc-Controls-Toolkit-Support-to-Mvc4-WebApi.aspx
and then refer to the other tutorilas linked.
I always used asp.net webforms with the MVP pattern, it works great for what I need, I basically create a project where all my business rules reside, validation etc... and I then implement my views in the webforms project.
Now we're starting to use asp.net MVC and using the MVP patter doesn't make much sense, right? So what could be a good approach to create a scalable and testable project using MVC that won't make me create my data objects and do validation on the controllers. I don' want to have the same code in different places...
If a web user wants to update his/her profile on the site, there would be some validation rules for when a submit button is pushed, like email address cannot be empty, must be valid and must not exist in the database.
These same rules should be applied if I try to update his profile using the internal admin section without having to duplicate the code there...
If you can point me to a good sample project that deals with this would be great!
Thanks in advance!
You should use the MVC pattern with ASP.Net MVC.
The NerdDinner tutorial is a pretty detailed example for MVC, you can also get a book that includes the tutorial (you might want to wait for the version that covers ASP.Net MVC 3). There are plenty of resources on Microsoft's ASP.Net site.
You can always consult Google.
ASP .NET MVC was built with the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern in mind. That would be the pattern you'd want to use.
In addition to the resources magnifico provided, I know others have recommended the some other tutorials. I don't know if these have been updated to the latest version of the framework, but they should still serve as decent beginners.
MVC Storefront series
MVC Music Store
Also the Microsoft Patterns & Practices group recently released Project Silk which gets into more advanced techniques involving a lot of AJAX management of the UI. There's interesting stuff there.
Django has the Flatpages app, which lets site admins change content on specific pages without changing code. Flatpage content i stored in the database, sort of like in a CMS. Flatpages are typically used for about-pages and such.
Are there any good equivalents for ASP.Net MVC? I.e., a convenient way to manage page-content persisted to a database.
No.
Django seems closer to a CMS then "ASP.NET MVC" which is both a framework and just a general design pattern.
Have a look at http://http://cmsmvc.codeplex.com, it allows you to create pages, and manage content on the page.
The solution is still in early stages, but it could help you out.
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.
Telerik claims their controls work with ASP.NET MVC now. Has anyone already used the controls in a MVC project?
My company uses the Telerik ASP.NET controls in a large application and it works out quite well. That's why we think about using them in a MVC project.
EDIT 1:
telerik has a new go at ASP.NET MVC this looks much better then their first go at it. But it was to late for my project. http://www.telerik.com/products/aspnet-mvc.aspx
You could check out the demo application (a forums application) they built using ASP.NET MVC, announced here. Source code is available.
The demo is a simple- and stylish -
forums application. It uses 9 of the
RadControls, including RadGrid,
RadEditor, RadChart, RadTreeView and
RadUpload, to build a forum site that
has basic thread/post navigation,
formatted forum posting, user
authentication (with support for
custom avatars), and a site activity
"Statistics" view. Everything you need
to have a fully functional MVC forums
app. The source is available for
immediate download, so I encourage
anyone interested in learning more
about MVC or the RadControls in MVC to
grab the bites and study the example.
You may have already seen it, but Telerik has a blog post about how to use their controls with MVC and some of the limitations. I don't actually use their controls so I can't speak to whether the limitations are really a problem. It does appear that there is a a little more "manual lifting", so to speak, when using the controls with MVC but that there are workarounds to get most of them to work properly.
I'm hoping that they will eventually release MVC versions of their controls. I'm holding off evaluating them until that happens, but if you're already using them I'd certainly look to see how easy they would be to use with MVC. Perhaps you could update your question with an answer if you give it a try and let the rest of us know how it went.
I have been using the Telerik controls for about 6 months. I have been using the Grid and Window controls on MVC 2. Like most commercial products there are issues we have been fortunate to work them out. Once you get past the initial learning curve the controls are time savers. You can't beat the price for the amount of functionality you get.
My biggest issue is that they seem a bit sluggish responding on their forums. Maybe I'm just asking lame questions. I've been lobbying management to pay the $ for the supported version. Considering the amount of time we spend digging around to solve some of the more complicated problems I think it would be worth it.
I've just had a look at their grid and wrote a small POC project with it and must say I'm quite impressed. I'm not sure about their previous MVC controls iterations, but the current one can be a real time saver. It also fits very nicely into ASP.NET MVC ajax applications since there is a rich client-side API. Having jquery DataTables on the client side results in an even better user experience (because it is much faster), but also requires more error-prone javascript code.
As an alternative, you can check for MDBootstrap (it´s a front-end framework built on top of Bootstrap). There you will find an article with free ASP.NET MVC templates.