Copied to clipboard

Flag this post as spam?

This post will be reported to the moderators as potential spam to be looked at


  • Jan Michael Te 1 post 21 karma points
    Aug 23, 2011 @ 08:55
    Jan Michael Te
    0

    Begginer Advice on what to do

    Good day to everyone, im a newbie and just beginning on Umbraco.

    Based on the documents/video it's seem there are macros and xslt's to customize Umbraco.

    My company is asking me on the estimates to convert our old classic asp corporate site to Umbraco. Our existing site has menu/sections that is being shown if the entrypoint url has the correct querystring values. We have also 4 or more section's contents are being fetched from our information system.

    I would like to seek everyone's advice on the correct course i should take to do the port and estimate?

    I plan to migrate 1st the site them and static items first then do the customization.

    Should I use macror or xslt to hide/show e.g menu items or pictures of people.

    Or i need to modify the whole Umbraco source code to get the desired requirements?

     

    Thanks in Advance ^_^

     

  • Bo Damgaard Mortensen 719 posts 1207 karma points
    Aug 23, 2011 @ 23:54
    Bo Damgaard Mortensen
    0

    Hi Jan,

    What a perfectly good idea to create the site based on Umbraco! :)

    I won't go into the actual estimate as there's way too many unknown factors to me. However, I think it would be a good idea to "break down" the existing site into bits that can be reused, i.e. stylesheet, markup and structure. This would be simple copy/paste work.

    Next, install Umbraco on your favorite test environment, typically on your developer-computer as a local installation. Then set up the required document types, add a masterpage which contains the base-markup that should always be displayed no matter what content is presented and make this the master template of any other templates.

    With your document types and corresponding templates set up, you should now be able to start creating the structure in the Content section for your site. Mind you, this is the step where many developers makes the mistake of thinking as a developer instead of the actualy end-user that's going to manage the content of the website. So be gentle and careful when it comes to structuring the site and seperate content from modules etc.

    When it comes to functionality on a site in Umbraco, yes - you should use either:

    - XSLT
    - ASP.NET UserControls
    - .. or Razor

    The most common so far are the first two, XSLT and UserControls. UserControls should be used for when you have to create functionality where you have to use the Umbraco API, i.e. creating forms and such. XSLT is more of a presentation language (though some might disagree) So, as an example, when you want to create a navigation menu for your site, you'll want to do this with XSLT where you list all the documents from your Content tree. This will create a dynamic menu that corresponds to the actions taken on the documents in the Content tree, such as deleting/creating new documents.

    You can see Macros as a basic "wrapper" for an XSLT file, a UserControl or a Razor file. It "simply" just represents the functionality of either of the three in a masterpage.

    In other words, you should not be required to change anything in the Umbraco source code to create a website - it's all covered in the API itself :-)

    I'll recommend buying access to the umbraco.tv section and watch the movies there to get started. Eventually, watch as many as you can and play with a test umbraco installation as much as you can before creating your estimate. And remember, from personal experience: copy/pasting css/markup and creating the right document types takes longer than you'd expect! :)

    I hope this helps just a little. If anything, play around with Umbraco as much as possible to get it "under your nails". It's quite easy to create great websites when you first get the hang of the CMS.

    All the best,

    Bo 

Please Sign in or register to post replies

Write your reply to:

Draft