How do I provide easy editing of ASP .NET master pages for designers?

Question

Scenario: I have a pretty standard master page for all my pages. It includes the usual login forms and other dynamic lists to be extracted on each page. Webdesigners can already modify the central content place holder of each page. But still, the design and layout for the master page is still in my project and any modification to the design must be made in Visual Studio and the project re-compiled and re-deployed.

What is the best way to provide near-full access to designing the master page through a CMS? Some of the problems I can identify is the inclusion of any dynamic lists or specific controls such as a login form.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Unless you want to host your content within a portal I don't know of a perfect answer to this.

If the bits they design just amount to look and feel for the page then this can be controlled by css and you could allow them to create themes using different css files.

Answer 2

This is indeed an interesting question, and there is no perfect solution. I worked for an ecommerce shop with this issue, and frankly, I just asked the designers in many cases to provide me there html and css, then I would grab the html pieces and css and add them to my project. Yes this was tedious....

Then we we built a cms where the designers could copy and paste their html into html editors, and we would store those pieces of html in a database. My web app would grab those from the database at run time. This solve some issues, but not all, since it did not give them complete control of the design of the web page.

The bottom line is you need to standard as to how the designer will submit their work to you. If you have that, and you can count on the html and css, then you can star to think of possibly building a CMS around that. In this days of RAD, I have found it easier to just work with the html and css delivered to me and simply copy and paste the pieces into my master page and other pages as needed.