Contribute ASP.NET development

[caffine_high]

Hi everyone.

I am currently building an ASP.NET (ver 1.1) website which will allow users to
publish content to the site. I've been told by an ASP developer that you can
use Contribute as a means of adding content to the site, and storing this in a
database (in my case SQL Server 2000).

Basically my question is: how on earth do you do this? I can get the content
out of the database, but when i go to edit the page in contribute it shows all
the ASP tags on the page.

Could anyone shed some light as how to do this / or provide some examples
(pref in ASP.NET with VB) as it is driving me nuts lol

thanks for your time.

[bobby bro]

Did you get an answer yet?

I'm hoping that by this time, you've figured a few things out with .NET. I'm
having a problem with AJAX and Contribute not being able to render AJAX
correctly, most notably on a tree menu that we are using on the left navigation
structure.

Do you know anything about how to get around screwy page renderings that occur
in Contribute?

The last .NET rendering problems were resolved with 3.11 updater, but AJAX
problems haven't been addressed to my knowledge. Does anyone else know?

Thanks,

bob_bro
[url]http://www.sneakerwebdesign.com[/url]

[Tamlin]

I also wanted to see if you'd gotten an answer on this yet or if you'd figured it out. I am looking at a very similar task with .NET and SQL server.

[bobby bro]

No. I've been having problems with AJAX and Contribute. I did find a way around
some display issues that were occurring and that was to simply add a row below
the content area with an invisible gif defined at the width of the page that I
wanted the content area to be. That held the content area at a consistent
width, but the AJAX menus aren't showing up in Contribute and renderings are
causing the page to look messed up.

How are you using SQL and Contribute? Usually, we just make admin areas for
updates to database driven content.

[Tamlin]

The company that I'm writing a proposal for has EVERYTHING in a SQL database
even news. They want to migrate it to a new host and CMS system but also can't
budget for some of the enterprise options. The current system is Dreamweaver so
I was hoping Contribute would be a good answer.

Are the admin areas set up in contribute or did you write a front end admin
area for them? The admin person is a non-coder so it will have to be very user
friendly.

Thanks

[bobby bro]

We design/develop the admin areas. I was looking at [url]www.interaktonline.com[/url] -
they have the KTML for content management. I've never used it because my two
programmers can easily develop admin areas. It does look pretty cool though.

I use Interakt a lot for PHP and ColdFusion development (MX Kollection 3). I
know that they have some easy to use stuff. We also use CSS menus 2 from them
and we've been using the Kollection for 2 years. It pretty much creates a lot
of the admin pages and includes, but .NET is so much more organized when it
comes to all that. They have a .NET extension, but my guess is that Visual
Studio is going to provide you with enough drag and drop features to make it
happen. I know that they have the Login credentialing as a drag and drop, along
with a library class I think.

You can't update database content with Contribute as far as I know. I've been
using Contribute for about 4 years and haven't seen that it can be used for
database content. But I can be wrong and this field we're in requires us to
re-educate ourselves constantly, so don't shoot me...

[Tamlin]

Thank you for your feedback - that helps a lot. I've touched on interakt every
once in a while but for some reason it just doesn't come to mind for some of
that stuff. I'll take another look at it. I think that we are going to suggest
NOT putting some stuff in the database and still using contribute for a
majority of the items.

Thanks again :)