Well its been a busy year and as usually we have been neglecting our own website and marketing.  One positive is that we have been guilty of this due to the sheer work load this year.

Over the next few days and weeks we will be updating our 2010 to date portfolio .. until then here one new project which we completed this year and are now working to turn into mandarin Chinese.

http://www.theithelper.com/Real-estate-property-websites-web-detail.aspx

We have been using Blogengine.net for over a year now and have found it to be a great application. In this post I will tell you how we plan to tweak it to deliver a lightweight CMS system.

Requirement Specification

As a part of this development the source code of BlogEngine.net will be modified to manage Pages that feed content to multiple sites. The source code will be modified to persist “Site” information of a page to XML files as done currently in BlogEngine. Associate a page to a site (one to one relation), view/edit pages per site basis.

 Constraints

The title of the pages will remain unique. The Site metadata information is only to ease the process of managing Site pages. A naming convention of “SiteName-PageName” for the title of the page can be followed in cases multiple sites have pages with the same name. E.g. AFH-Home, TheITHelper-Home etc.

Proposed Changes

-Site Management: Manage Sites

A site tab will be added to the menu in the Pages tab on the top. This will be used to manage pages for site, add a new site. Sites name and description can be edited or deleted. However a site existing pages cannot be deleted.

 -Add a new site

Modal popup to add a new site.

-Associate a page to a site

When pages are added/edited

When pages are associated to a site, a file will be used to persist the one to one relation between the pages and sites. This will done similarly as Categories are associated with posts.

- Editing pages of a site

When the view pages on manage site screen is clicked (1(i)), a page will be shown that lists the pages belonging to that particular site. Pages can be edited or deleted from this screen.

Integration with Future Versions of BlogEngine.net

The changes made will be made as per coding standards of BlogEngine to ease integration with future versions of BlogEngine.net.  The changes will be documented to ease the integration process. 

Extracting Content of Pages In Site pages

The existing BlogContent user control will be used to extract content from the pages of the modified BlogEngine.net site with little or no change.

XML persistence files

Site XML file for saving Site data

Modify the Page xml to include site information 

These web 2011 toolbars are very of the the moment and we have been asked to write one for a client.

We used the excellent ground work at

http://tinyurl.com/ybxrvmp

The host website is an online resource for careers  advice giving you the inside story of how careers work.  We added the following "clever bits " to the toolbar

A) "Search Films": pop up box with a keyword search box & underneath a list of film titles. User can keyword search for a film or scroll the list and click a film to play. The selected film will play in a facebox in the centre of the screen.

In the background we will have a film directory file that stores the video titles and video IDs. The ID will be injected dynamically into our standard embed code to play the video. This directory file will need to be editable by me so I can add new titles as they are produced.

B) "Search Tutorials": pop up box with a search box & underneath a list of tutorials. User can keyword search for a tutorial or scroll the list and click a tutorial to view. Tutorial is a web page that the user will navigate to (same window).

In the background we will have a tutorial directory file that stores the tutorial titles and URLs. 

C) "Bookmark page" button: when clicked this will add the page title (set in a page directory file) to the user's personal bookmarks ("My Bookmarks") - new table we'll need to create in the db.

D) "Page Tip" button: when clicked this will pop the facebox with a text tip to help the user get the most from the page they are currently on/viewing. Tips for each page will be set in the page directory file.

E) "Announcements" button: I want each of our clients to be able to push custom messages to their users. So, when clicked this will pop the facebox with the message (text & links). I'd also like this to auto pop when the page loads and have a "suppress message" option in the face box to stop auto loading for a period eg. 1 day. This item will require a check to see which client the user belongs to, so that they receive the correct message.

F) "My Bookmarks": pop up box with the page titles that have been bookmarked by the user - each item can be clicked and navigated to in the same window.
There will be a "delete" option to remove the bookmark from the list.

For more info contact us by clicking on http://www.theithelper.com/contact-us.aspx