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Sidharth - 12/30/2008 10:34:09 AM
   
importing existing .Net 2 website
Hello,

I'm new to Kentico, and indeed to CMS in general. I've got an existing .Net 2 website which our clients now want to be able to edit the static text of, and potentially being able to add new files (like PDF, pages, etc) that can be linked/opened from other pages.

The problem is that we only want them to be able to edit certain parts of the website/pages. From what I can tell Kentico has this ability?

I have installed Kentico and am trying to get the existing website and the CMS site to co-exist but I'm unsure what the best way to do this would be. Obviously, we'd still want to be able to continue developing in Visual Studio and mark certain parts of pages as being CMS-editable but how do I go about doing this? I have installed 2 versions of Kentico for running with Visual Studio Development Server and with IIS. Should I just literally copy the files from my existing website (i.e. all the aspx, aspx.cs, ascx, ascx.cs, master file, css, images, etc) into the root folder of the Kentico website? (And merge all the web.configs and global.asax etc from both the sites?)

The documentation guide (http://www.kentico.com/docs/devguide/index.html?creating_a_new_aspx_page_templ.htm) seems to suggest there are many ways to do this.

The first one "Mixing both together" says "The easiest way is to use Kentico CMS web project as the main project since it's already correctly configured for CMS and add your own ASPX pages and other files to this project." So does that mean what I mentioned before? I.e. if Kentico is installed in C:\Projects\KenticoCMS\ and my current website files are in C:\Projects\MyWebsite then I should copy all the files from MyWebsite into KenticoCMS? (and merge any files with the same name?).

The other options seem really interesting. I.e. "Having CMS in the root and your application in a subfolder" or "Having your application in the root and CMS in a subfolder". Ideally, that would great to keep the development code base and CMS base totally separate yet still allow the client users to be able to edit the text as they want but I can't seem to get this to work. So I've created a subfolder inside the Kentico folder for the existing website and copied all the .net code into it but it's not picking it up - I would've thought that I'd have to do/register something so that it picks it or knows about it anyway. Or am I going about this the wrong way?

This website that we've created is used by our client and their clients. So we only want certain users of our clients to be able to manage the content and everybody else just sees the site as if nothing ever changed.

Apologies for the newbie questions, but any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Kind regards.
Sidharth

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kentico_helenag - 1/5/2009 3:08:55 AM
   
RE:importing existing .Net 2 website
Hello Sidharth,

the best approach would be to register the pages like the mentioned instruction (http://www.kentico.com/docs/devguide/index.html?creating_a_new_aspx_page_templ.htm). Your controls (*.ascx) could be in the same folder or you could register them as new web parts (http://www.kentico.com/docs/devguide/developing_web_parts.htm) – this way would be more universal and useful for the further development.

The “Integration with your existing ASP.NET application” article is not suitable for you because you need to allow some users to edit the pages. The pages should be in the CMSDesk (so that they could be edited in the web interface) and have our controls (editable regions). This article is dedicated for stand-alone application – it does not ensure the integration with the administrators interface (CMSDesk and CMSSiteManager).

You could allow the users to edit the content by setting of security permissions. More information about the security could be found in this chapter: http://www.kentico.com/docs/devguide/security_model.htm

If you have some other question please feel free to ask.

Best regards,
Helena Grulichova