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blog has the latest information and newsNorth Georgia's new site with our NEW CMS
Posted on 4/16/2009
The North Georgia website was launched on April 1 and it was our first website using Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC framework.
This article is a walkthrough of some of the features and functions of this particular website and discussion of some of the improvements in our new ASP.NET MVC based content management system.
You can visit the site at: www.ngumc.org
The North Georgia site is not only our first ASP.NET MVC site, but it's also our first deployment of our new CMS using ASP.NET MVC.
The main features of this website and/or our new CMS are:
It has an attractive and consistent design throughout the site. The use of numerous ASP.NET master pages made it easier for us to keep every page in the site and all the code involved very clean and simple.
We also used analysis of millions of page views to almost 30 other UMC Conference websites as a way of designing the homepage and all the parts of the site to allow users to most easily get to what they needed.
Here's our article on that page view analysis.
The search is an improvement over the search in our Classic ASP systems. The results are more relevent and the results come much faster. We experimented with using Google SiteSearch (like we do on our own site) but the lack of control over when the pages are indexed by Google made us ultimately choose to base our search around SQL Server's full text indexing.
We did this by creating a SQL Server job that runs hourly and grabs records from many tables and puts them into a "public records" table. This "public records" table is then indexed by SQL Server.
North GA had/has a ton of Classic ASP code that, given our time and money constraints, was unconvertable. On the other hand we wanted to have the entire site dictated by ASP.NET master pages. The solution: we created a controller in MVC that consumes Classic ASP pages and retunrs their content within the master page.
read more about the Classic ASP consumer here or...
read the full technical article about our MVC converstion here.
We baked iCal functionality into the calendar and improved the interface so that users can browse through all the types of events in either calendar, list or iCal format.
We decide to create a blog that pulls together posting from all the employees of and around the conference into one central place. It shows the most recent posts from the entire organization on the homepage and allows the user to browse by topic and author.
By using ASP.NET MVC, the site has clean URLs.
And much more
Check out the site yourself, but here's a list of some of the other improvements we made:
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