My website needs light content editing, is running Umbraco as a separate site good idea?
Hello everyone,
We would like to give our writer the ability to add new articles, and business users the ability to approve/publish the articles to our existing site (MVC 3, Razor). We will be using the latest Umbraco version (4.8.0).
The article page has 3 columns in the following order: dynamic navigation menu; article content; then dynamic ad rotator. We hope to be able to bolt on CMS functionality to manage just the article content (2nd column) without going the full CMS site route (merging our site into the CMS). Searching the internet, I found some mentions that Umbraco could do this. I am ready to apply this solution but couldn't find an example or a more detail discussion of how to do it. It'd be great if I could hear it from the Umbraco community here whether it's a viable option.
If it is not feasible, my next option would be to set up a separate Umbraco site (private and internal) for the writer and business users to manage the content creation/approval process. The main production site would then retrieve the article html directly from the Umbraco database to render in the 2nd column of the article page. Any gotcha of doing it this way, or any reason not to do it this way?
Do I have any other option?
Your comments and insight are greatly appreciated.
I've never merged an existing MVC3 website with Umbraco, so can't offer advice on that. I do know that whilst there are some tools to faciliate MVC within Umbraco 4, it's not fully geared up for MVC just yet, so you may find issues in merging the two - I guess it depends on the complexity of your existing application.
If it's not possible to port the entire thing over to Umbraco, you could take advantage of Umbraco's XML data-store by running it as a separate site and feeding the required content through to your MVC site. Since Umbraco uses XML to store content, it's pretty trivial to write a macro to output your data in a format that's easily consumed (e.g. RSS or there are several packages to format Umbraco data as JSON too). I'd say that data syndication would be the simplest way to tackle this, personally.
My website needs light content editing, is running Umbraco as a separate site good idea?
Hello everyone,
We would like to give our writer the ability to add new articles, and business users the ability to approve/publish the articles to our existing site (MVC 3, Razor). We will be using the latest Umbraco version (4.8.0).
The article page has 3 columns in the following order: dynamic navigation menu; article content; then dynamic ad rotator. We hope to be able to bolt on CMS functionality to manage just the article content (2nd column) without going the full CMS site route (merging our site into the CMS). Searching the internet, I found some mentions that Umbraco could do this. I am ready to apply this solution but couldn't find an example or a more detail discussion of how to do it. It'd be great if I could hear it from the Umbraco community here whether it's a viable option.
If it is not feasible, my next option would be to set up a separate Umbraco site (private and internal) for the writer and business users to manage the content creation/approval process. The main production site would then retrieve the article html directly from the Umbraco database to render in the 2nd column of the article page. Any gotcha of doing it this way, or any reason not to do it this way?
Do I have any other option?
Your comments and insight are greatly appreciated.
Hi Andrew,
I've never merged an existing MVC3 website with Umbraco, so can't offer advice on that. I do know that whilst there are some tools to faciliate MVC within Umbraco 4, it's not fully geared up for MVC just yet, so you may find issues in merging the two - I guess it depends on the complexity of your existing application.
If it's not possible to port the entire thing over to Umbraco, you could take advantage of Umbraco's XML data-store by running it as a separate site and feeding the required content through to your MVC site. Since Umbraco uses XML to store content, it's pretty trivial to write a macro to output your data in a format that's easily consumed (e.g. RSS or there are several packages to format Umbraco data as JSON too). I'd say that data syndication would be the simplest way to tackle this, personally.
Thanks Dan, I will run Umbraco as a separate site. I think that's the best option. Thanks very much again Dan.
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