How to make a fully customizable hosted ASP.NET MVC application

Question

This is related to my previous question regarding serving static html files but that doesn't seem to be a good solution,

I want to make a fully customizable ASP.NET MVC application as a hosted service. See allowing the user to customize the look/feel of their own page but it is still dynamic, meaning the data is hosted in the central database.

I looked at the "theme" or "skin" in ASP.NET but I don't think it is customizable enough. It seems only the developer can add new themes. I want to have something like the theme editor in WordPress so you can just change the look in anyway you want from a web-based interface.

I wonder how the theme files will be stored for the popular blogging platform? Are they stored in database or a file in filesystem? I prefer to store it in database, because if it is in filesystem it will have scalability problem. Each user will be tired to a particular web server and I have to determine how much disk space for each webserver.

I thought of doing something like the old MovableType, to generate static HTML when you add new post. This solution is problematic as well, because the flexibility depends on the complexity of the template engine.

Ideas? Suggestions?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The theme editor in WordPress simply allows you to edit Theme PHP files... You can do it exactly like in wordpress but instead of editing PHP files your theme is composed of a set of aspx\ascx files without code-behinds...

Answer 2

"Fully customizable" is the most elusive of the white whales ;-)

I see your question is old, but none the less; first I'd recommend defining some very clear,
and cohesive rules governing just what the "bottom-line" is, our an inheritable template of sorts.
You get a pretty good impression of what might be useful during developing, I'd guess.

Next; just what and how is the customizing supposed to be presented and achieved?

The inherit ASP.NET custom custard, Web Parts, need quite some cajoling to behave in MVC views :
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1106629/using-webparts-in-an-mvc-application

If you're leaning more towards customizable appearance (theme's n' skin's),
how about having a CSS file for each user, saves like a charm as VARCHAR(MAX), and can easily be inserted in e.g. your Master Page's head.