Anyway, I’m very excited about TouchPointCMS development. It’s looking to be a very promising and solid CMS with endless add-on functionality. It’s also amazing how much faster this version runs over the old adhoc’d versions. One of the last updates to TouchPointCMS was improving the caching mechanisms used throughout the site in order to decrease load times and save on server resources.

I’m also finding that writing add-on modules now is incredibly easy. For example, we’re deploying TouchPointCMS for smart-spice.com and they want to include a spice manager. We can do this pretty quickly, considering a basic module consists of roughly 3 core files (5 if using code-behind):

• The user control that the end user sees (.ASCX and .CS)
• The user control that the CMS user sees for management (.ASCX and .CS)
• A meta.config file for SQL related to installation, deletion, generating instances, icon, etc.

Essentially, that’s all you need for building a module. For the spice manager, I combined functionality from the included Blog and Photo Gallery modules to allow for a simple spice list manager with images. The front end user control is nothing more than a ASP.NET ListView control bound to the spices for that page.

The modules that you create are automatically loaded with the web page. If you want to customize the placement of the module, such as having a Events module off to the left or right sizes of your page, you can deselect the Render Inline Module option from the CMS. This will disable the automatic rendering of the module, allowing you to use the <tpc:Event runat=”server” /> instance to create a list of events wherever you like on your template file. If you want to use events from another page, just include the PageID=”6″ attribute, where 6 is the page ID you wish to pull from.

Check back later for updated CMS development and release!

Learn more about TouchPointCMS.

TouchPointCMS hopes to alleviate this, at least to an extent. After all, if we had a perfect solution, we’d all be developers. TouchPointCMS contains template folders, inside a dedicated templates folder located at the root. Inside the templates section of the CMS, you will see the list of template folders available, along with the one that is currently active. Inside of each template folder is essentially your entire website. By this, I mean that you’ll have any style or script folders, along with your content pages, such as home, interior, custom, etc (these pages must be ASP.NET pages ending in .ASPX).

The idea is that each content page will have a unique structure if needed. For example, your home page may contain a large introductory banner which will not be part of interior pages. You may have a page containing a sidebar of events or other content. Because TouchPointCMS is aimed at those who are even a little web savvy (and who isn’t these days?), the idea is to use the built-in Controls and Modules inside of these templates where needed. An example of a module can be <tpc:PageContent />, which will automatically display any content for that page or any type (such as a gallery page, or a web form). You may also choose to display individual modules anywhere you like on your template, such as <tpc:Form /> to display the web form for that page. Specific controls such as RichNavigation to enable a rich drop-down navigation bar, BreadCrumbs, for showing your depth in the website, or Topic, for showing a reusable section of HTML content throughout your site.

Once your templates have these modules, they can then be assigned to pages in your site. On the templates page in the CMS, you may not only choose your overall template, but set a default template for all your pages. Individually for each page, you may assign a template (home, interior, etc) from those available when editing that page in the CMS.

There is one requirement however. All your pages must use an ASP.NET Master page. Before getting scared, this is simply a shell to be used around all your template files. For example, we can assume that all your templates will have basic HTML elements that can be used throughout, such as html and body tags, as well as a list of included CSS and JavaScript files. Master pages are a good practice, as they enforce the re-use of content. You can have as much or as little repeated content in your Master page as you like. You may even have multiple Master pages. Also, in order to tie into the CMS, the Master page(s) must inherit from the TouchPointCMS.Core.Template class. Taking a look at one of the included modules will provide much insight to the basic structure.

From that point on, the rest is populating your site. Check back for more TouchPointCMS overviews!

Learn more about TouchPointCMS.

• Read more about TouchPointCMS »
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