Joe On ASP.NET

Themes & Master Pages - Are they enough ?

I’m not a graphics designer, not even close.

In fact, I’m what you might refer to as esthetically challenged.

So lately I’ve been toying with the idea of building an ASP.NET based CMS, mostly due to my frustration about the lack of .NET based options when compared to PHP.

So I’ve been working on application architecture and ASP.NET offers lots of great synergies, but one place I’m stuck is in the area of UI abstraction for the purpose of themeing.

I understand how themes and Master Pages work technically, but my lack of design acumen leaves me struggling when evaluating them for complex UI design.

So, to get me started I picked up a copy of Jacob Sanford’s new book….

ASP.NET 2.0 Design – CSS, Themes and master Pages

JacobSanfordBook

I’ll blog a review and probably do some videos from what I learn, but in the mean time…..

What are YOUR thoughts about Themes and Master pages ?

What are the issues, tips, tricks, gotchas ?

Are Themes & master Pages flexible enough to serve as a templating engine for an application like Joomla or am I better off building an HTML/CSS skinning system from scratch ?

Thanks!

Posted: Sep 17 2007, 08:22 PM by JoeStagner | with 2 comment(s)

Comments

Timothy Khouri said:

Looking forward to it!.. I wrote my own CMS once... it was a lot of fun. About 5 months of work (ASP.NET 1.1)

Maybe I'll pick it up again with 3.5!

# September 17, 2007 10:43 PM

AndrewSeven said:

I would say that what is important in developing a CMS is to not break the underlying platform. You can provide a custom templating engine, but  if people can't do exactly what they want, they will expect to be able to use standard tech.

I've seen two major asp.net packages recently that work and yet have issues because of how they do things: They both do databinding in OnLoad(e) which make the controls almost impossible to change from event  handlers. They are "smart controls" but they are dumb about how to be smart ;)

# September 18, 2007 8:50 AM
Leave a Comment

(required) 

(required) 

(optional)

(required)