Hi,

As you may have seen, I've posted a couple of messages in these forums. Unfortunately, while the message I have had a response to has been of some help - I am still confused by Umbraco terminology and despite having an Umbraco TV subscription, I still feel I don't understand how everything fits together and thus cannot start to figure out how to achieve the functionality I need for my website.

I have a specific example of something that I would like to understand how to create in Umbraco. I have an Image Gallery that I wrote a while ago in ASP.net. It is based around a WebForms user control which contains Javascript classes that form the bulk of the Image Gallery functionality. AJAX is used to dynamically load the images when the user scrolls the page down (they are served via JSON).

In traditional ASP.net WebForms, I can insert an instance of my Image Gallery control anywhere in a WebForms page by adding the specific Image Gallery server control tag along with the appropriate parameters (e.g. path to images).

I would like to create a similar Image Gallery plugin for Umbraco. I don't want to wrap my existing WebForms Control, but want to create something similar using the proper Umbraco methods. I believe I need to create some sort of plugin package, but what I don't understand is how I create the Image Gallery control. Is it a Render Controler, is it a Surface Controller I need to create or neither of these? How do I link a frontend display controller to a backend property editor?

There seems to be very little documentation convering a scenario such as this which is quite surprising. I would have thought that creating custom plugins to provide special functionality to an Umbraco website would be quite a popular activity.

Many thanks for your help and clarification,

Damien.