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41

answers:

1

I'm an ASP.NET newbie, but not so new at programming in general. I'm creating a commercial website, and I want to allow an admin to add new articles (an article consists of text, images and various properties such as category). I am trying to decide the optimal Modus Operandi. This site is commercial, so SEO is a major consideration. This means that I want each url to be "unique". That is, if someone navigates to an article about raccoons, he should be redirected to www.mysite.com/articles/raccoons. This means - I can't have one page that loads the appropriate article dynamically a-la AJAX (gotta use deep-linking)

So how exactly do I do this? suppose the admin entered his text, uploaded the images and set the article properties. I create a new subfolder, save the images to the server (I understand that saving images to a DB is a big no-no), their addresses in a DB, and the content itself to the DB. But now what?

How do I go about creating the actual page?

Is there a function for creating a new aspx file? then what about its corresponding cs file? Or is it unwise to use aspx? Maybe plain html? but then how does it work with my site's master page? Or maybe just create another copy of a general aspx file which is populated with an article according to a parameter?

I would like to know what is the "smartest" approach before I dive in too deep.

+2  A: 

You can Consider ASP.Net MVC for this. What you need is more like a Content Management System rather than a Blog, as you mentioned an administrator will add articles.

By Using ASP.Net MVC, you have a very clean implementation there, your urls will stay as you need it for SEO, You dont have to create aspx pages on the fly but the framework will let you deal with new urls from your class files.

Vimal Raj
Considering this is a pretty small site, with only one "admin" - would you consider MVC "overkill", or is it the only way to achieve what I want? (without resorting to "hacks" and other nasty business)
Tom Teman
I would recommend using any available CMSs from the market or from the open source community. I personally feel that MVC will not be an overkill because of 1. If it is a simple site, You need to create the classes for very few requirements. and 2. You can always expand your site to manage many other things in future , ie you have an extensible application.
Vimal Raj
Seems like this is indeed the best way to go about it. Thanks a lot!!
Tom Teman
You might want to look at the MVC version of the N2 CMS :-)
IrishChieftain