I was hoping to get some insite on a new Umbraco project I'm starting. I've rolled a couple Umbraco-based sites before, so I have a little experience with the platform.
I'm looking to build a white-labelled support site. The content is nearly 100% static, with the exception of substitution of trademarks, and company names, etc.
Content is only editable by one individual (so I don't have to worry about permissions between brands etc).
Single datastore for content (i.e. avoid duplication of pages if possible)
Be able to substitute the brand name into content based on hostname
Support for mulitple languages
Restrict content based on hostname (e.g. support.brand1.com/secretstuff is displayed, support.brand2.com/secretstuff is not displayed)
I have a few thoughts around how to possibly put this together under a single umbraco installation and "site" but wondered if any of you smarter folk had suggestions. Am I being silly to try to get this all to work as stated?
sounds reasonable to me. The only question I would ask myself is this: how much modifications do you need (or want) to do for an installation of your support site? Which leads ultimately to the question: does it make sense to build one huge system that needs modifications throughout, or develop a set of custom modules that you can plug in easily without much modifications and create the site around it? What Umbraco definitely excels at is putting up a range of pages with straightforward templates and CSS, that can be done for very easy sites and a very short amount of time. What takes time to develop are the sexy new little bits and pieces of work that are custom made and are ideally usable on other sites as well.
If you say your system only really makes sense as a whole package (e.g. something like the uForum) then by all means go for it!
It's going to be fairly static as I mentioned. Simple substitution of brand names etc would take care of most things and CSS would take care of any skinning. I really don't want to deviate a great deal from out-of-the-box Umbraco functionality unless required.
The hurdles, as I see them are:
1. Be able to use the hostname to restrict some content. 2. Be able to use the hostname as a token identifier for brand injection (may have to override some of the core rendering logic to look for tokens to replace, etc. which may lead to some performance concerns). Perhaps this is just a matter of creating a couple macros for the brand names and making sure the content editor uses them... dunno. 3. Make all this play nicely with localization.
White-label site in Umbraco
Hello,
I was hoping to get some insite on a new Umbraco project I'm starting. I've rolled a couple Umbraco-based sites before, so I have a little experience with the platform.
I'm looking to build a white-labelled support site. The content is nearly 100% static, with the exception of substitution of trademarks, and company names, etc.
The requirements kind of look like this:
I have a few thoughts around how to possibly put this together under a single umbraco installation and "site" but wondered if any of you smarter folk had suggestions. Am I being silly to try to get this all to work as stated?
Many thanks.
Where insite = insight and my numbered list actually renders as a numbered list. I can't edit the original post for some reason.
=)
Hi Brent,
sounds reasonable to me. The only question I would ask myself is this: how much modifications do you need (or want) to do for an installation of your support site? Which leads ultimately to the question: does it make sense to build one huge system that needs modifications throughout, or develop a set of custom modules that you can plug in easily without much modifications and create the site around it? What Umbraco definitely excels at is putting up a range of pages with straightforward templates and CSS, that can be done for very easy sites and a very short amount of time. What takes time to develop are the sexy new little bits and pieces of work that are custom made and are ideally usable on other sites as well.
If you say your system only really makes sense as a whole package (e.g. something like the uForum) then by all means go for it!
Regards,
Sascha
Thanks for the response Sascha.
It's going to be fairly static as I mentioned. Simple substitution of brand names etc would take care of most things and CSS would take care of any skinning. I really don't want to deviate a great deal from out-of-the-box Umbraco functionality unless required.
The hurdles, as I see them are:
1. Be able to use the hostname to restrict some content.
2. Be able to use the hostname as a token identifier for brand injection (may have to override some of the core rendering logic to look for tokens to replace, etc. which may lead to some performance concerns). Perhaps this is just a matter of creating a couple macros for the brand names and making sure the content editor uses them... dunno.
3. Make all this play nicely with localization.
...b
is working on a reply...