Using master pages with multiple entities

Question

I'm beginning to plan a complete redesign of our departments intranet pages. As it stands, every department gets their own folder within root. They all share the same look and feel but don't use CSS everything in each file is straight up static text. Basically, if a change has to be made to the header, every file must get changed. The number of files is somewhere in the hundreds. Since we're in the process of getting a new look & feel, I figured this would be the appropriate time to redesign the structure as a whole as well. My idea was to create a new C# Web Project to utilize the C# Master Pages. Within that project, each page would use the master page. Since I know they like to make many minor cosmetic changes, master pages would make things much simpler and quite frankly, I don't have time to manually edit a header 564 (random) times. The other aspect of this site is that the root would contain a documents folder within sub folders pertaining to each fo our departments.

Guess my question is, has anyone tackled an issue like this and could shed some light as to how they fixed it.

Also, would it be worth upgrading IIS and .NET to their latest version? And how much would this change cost?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I'll start with the cost question. You need to be using ASP.NET 2.0 or higher to take advantage of master pages. Technically the .NET framework is free, however Visual Studio is not. Visual Web Developer is free, but the license might be for non-commercial projects only. I'm not sure. IIS is also free, Windows Server 2008 is not. You are fine running on XP or Server 2000/2003. There isn't really any reason to upgrade.

I can't say that I have tackled a problem exactly like yours, but it sounds like what you need is a content management system. Some examples are the cuyahoga project, or Umbraco. These systems allow you to create a general look and feel, and store all content in a database or xml files and provide an online content editor, so the content of the pages can be managed by people that don't necessarily know HTML or Programming.

Answer 2

If you are already working in .NET 2.0, then you shouldn't need to do any upgrades, and there won't be any additional infrastructure cost.

I would highly recommend using Master pages, as they do make it painless to have a common look and feel for your entire site.

Another cool feature of Master pages is that you can nest them together. This would let you have a common feel between all pages. And then each department would have it's own Master page nested into your top-level page.

Answer 3

You can have a master-page hierarchy:

• Master page for everyone
  • Master page for department A
  • Master page for department B

Whatever's common for everyone you set in the first master page.

Then you make a master page for department A pages - this master page's master page is the first one.