What is best practice on ASP.NET MVC projects and extensionable/skinned systems?

Question

Hi!

I've been wondering about best practices on creating a project in MVC, and let others create extension/modules/plugins and skins/themes etc, for it.

For example WordPress is great at this. Just upload a file or folder. Or even browse the plugins directly from your WP administration and install by a simple click.

Does anybody here have a few tips on how to create a project that allows that flexibility. For the skins I might need to implement my own viewengine, right?

Any good resources and tips would be great.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Skinning isn't that hard, just swap stylesheets. For using a different set of templates, yes, you'd need just customize, not write your own, viewengine. This is pretty easy and all you'd have to do is tell MVC to look in different places for your views:

http://www.dotnetguy.co.uk/post/2010/01/31/ASPNET-MVC-e28093-Dynamically-Changing-The-Master-Page-(Theming).aspx

The MVC plugins widgets question has been asked before:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2230482/asp-net-mvc-2-widgets/2230833#2230833