Thursday 23 July 2009

From DNN to MVC?

The cloud9sites development is progressing steadily in my spare time. I have yet to push anything up to the web site as essentially these are the major pieces of the jigsaw that will change the site from an advert to a fully operational eCommerce application.

The 3 major components of this are the skin (or template) selection; the content capture and finally the domain name search. The idea is that a 3 stage wizard will be used to build the site - this is to counter all of the complex web site builders and Content Management Systems
that are targeted at web developers rather than end users.

1. The skin selection is using the ad-gallery Jquery plugin to spin through a selection of skin thumbnails showing the selected thumbnail in a larger window

2. The content entry is using the Jquery tabs as well as the FCKEditor plugin to give the WYSIWYG HTML editing.

3. I have written a web service wrapper for the domain tools API for the domain search feature


4. The last stage of the site wizard is to push the order into google checkout.

I now have a dilema. I have developed the wizard in ASP.NET 3.5 and JQuery with the style and plugins of JQuery UI.
Given that I am going to be offering a standard set of pages (Home, Contact, About) I
am now questioning whether or not a CMS is necessary (specifically Dot Net Nuke). Much of what I have been doing has being working "against the grain" of a CMS.

I will give this some thought, but my current idea is that an MVC/Jquery pairing could give me exactly what I need and more importantly allow me
to scale this by removing much of the overhead/noise that comes along with DNN. DNN is also proving to be slow. I also like the idea of the URL rewriting
in MVC and I plan to introduce some "Convention over Configuration" concepts so that the introduction of a new site can largely be driven by the
domain name (storing the site content in a folder specific to the domain name for example).

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