When I initially started hosting my own web site, I had a single domain name: www.imaginaryrealities.com. Since then, I’ve taken advantage of the subdomain support of my hosting provider, WebHost4Life, and I’ve added additional subdomains to my collection such as services.imaginaryrealities.com, downloads.imaginaryrealities.com, media.imaginaryrealities.com, and others. In addition, I’ve started other web sites for other purposes. For example, I host my wife’s classroom website on my account at http://www.mrscollinsclassroom.net. The end result, is that while I started with a single web site, over time I’ve added more.

The traditional model for hosting multiple web sites is that I register the domains or subdomains with the hosting provider, and then I point the domain to a directory on my hosting account where the files for the web site will be hosted from. In the majority of cases, each web site points to a different directory, and a different application. For example, both my blog and my wife’s web site are built using BlogEngine.NET. To accomplish this, I have two copies of BlogEngine.NET installed in two different directories of my hosting account. Twice the space for two web sites. It would be great if, with my new web site engine that I’m building, I could consolidate all of these web sites to a single application installation. This post will show you how I’m thinking of doing this. More...

It’s been a crazy week, and I am very much looking forward to the week ending. I read a quote from Colin Farrell in one of those tabloid magazines that my wife buys: “I was burning the candle at both ends, and the flames were meeting in the middle.” (Or something approximately close to that.) But that’s basically how I feel. Just way too much going on. But in the middle of all of that chaos, I’ve managed to find some time to do pleasant stuff like continue to explore Umbraco.

I came up with my latest extension while playing with templates. I’m still planning some posts hopefully this weekend to describe my document types and templates that I am building. Basically, document types are containers that have properties that contain data. Data can be images, files, text, other things. Templates describe where in the web page that the property data is inserted. Umbraco provides an ASP.NET server control that allows you to insert data into a page using the <umbraco:Item/> control, but sometimes you need data in a place where you can’t use a server control. To get around this problem, I created the <%$ Item:xxx $> expression. More...

Continuing on my previous posts, I’ve been looking into Umbraco more. I’m really liking the new features for version 4.0. My main complaint about it in previous versions when I looked at Umbraco were the proprietary membership database, and the difficulty of doing ASP.NET things with it. All of that seems to have been fixed with the upcoming 4.0 release. Umbraco now uses the ASP.NET membership and role providers, and templates have been replaced with ASP.NET master pages. In addition, direct support now exists for ASP.NET controls within pages. All-in-all, Umbraco 4.0 is shaping up to be a great release, in my opinion, and looks like it will be a great CMS for all purposes.

The one feature that is missing from Umbraco v4 is built-in support for ASP.NET themes. Umbraco supports CSS style sheets, but there are key uses for themes to control and customize the look-and-feel of web sites that is very special in ASP.NET, and a necessity for ASP.NET-based web sites. Umbraco would be killer if it supports that feature. Fortunately, as I discovered, it’s not that hard to add support for ASP.NET themes, and it’s even possible to let different parts of your web site use different themes. More...

In this post, I’ll continue my discussion of the construction of a new web site for ImaginaryRealities.com by discussing how I’m going to use ASP.NET themes to style and configure the “look” for my new web site. ASP.NET 2.0 introduced a new feature called themes which allows responsibilities on a web site to be truly separated between a developer that implements functionality and a designer that implements style. Using themes, the same web site can take on several different looks through a simple modification of the Web.config or application setting in a production environment. New looks can also be easily developed and deployed without making modifications to the existing web site. This post will discuss what ASP.NET themes are, how they work, and how they can be used in an ASP.NET web site or application. More...