ASP.NET cms and display template - 2 projects or just 1?

Question

This is a ASP.NET MVC beginner question (I'm in phase of developing NerdDinner)... I have assignment to create ASP.NET MVC cms (with its own design) and portal (also with its own design) that will display data that's being handled by CMS. I was wondering if I will have to make two individual projects in Visual Studio or I will have to use one project and place portal section in specific folder.
I know that my question is a bit premature (according to fact that I still haven't finished tutorial) but I'm bit impatient :)

On server (commercial hosting) I would use only one hosting account... this thing with URL routing is a bit confusing to me, CMS is practically also optimized for SEO.

I would like to the structure of URL to be:
---- PORTAL ----
www.domain.com
www.domain.com/Menu1/Submenu1
www.domain.com/Menu2/Submenu1/SubSubmenu1...
etc.

---- CMS ----
www.domain.com/CMS
www.domain.com/CMS/Whatever

Thanks,
Ile

Answer 1

It all depends on the functionality of the portal and the MVC cms.

For starters I would have a separate solution for the Model/Data Access that way you can have as many MVC projects without duplicating your data access.

From your desired url structure I would probably have the CMS as a separate controller and sub folder. Alternatively if your using MVC 2 you could look at the areas support which will probably give you a little more flexibility.

If you want the solution to be a bit more complex/flexible you have a number of options:

If both the portal and MVC cms are going to have he same functionality and page layout you have two master pages and determine which mater page to show when returning the view. You would specify this in the routing so multiple routes would point to different controllers.

If the layout/functionality differs slightly but one controller can still manage both you could have a separate controller project and two mvc projects which only contains the views, javascript and images so both mvc solutions look at your controller solution. With this option you would probable end up setting up two websites on your domain one under the root and the other under the CMS folder (in your MVC app you will prob need to block routes to /CMS so it will be processed by your CMS app).

Finally if both differ hugely have two separate projects but keep your common data access project, as above you may need to set up two sites on your hosting package.