Question

I have a CMS website written in aspx 2.0 that allows users to build up pages by dropping controls on a page and setting properties (reflection on the server side) and events (client side js). The render engine knows what property to call on each control to find out what to save into the database. I went through all the pitfalls of control re-hydration and lack of proper ids on the controls and really struggled to make the solution SEO friendly which currently is partial at best. Also suffer from viewstate getting huge so I have started to look at MVC as a better way forwards for the next version. The final design of the page is only set when the user decides to promote it live, and may make many changes per day.

A typical page may have many textbox controls, radio button groups, checkbox groups, dropdownlists and images. Also we have a few of our own controls that we reflect at runtime into the solution.

From my initial research into MVC, this looks to have been written to avoid these types of issues and not try to hide the html which looks very promising as well as giving final markup that is much more cross browser friendly.

Now the question – since the requirements are to generate dynamic pages with dynamic html controls, is this a step too far for MVC and I should stick with ASPX, or is there a way to generate the dynamic content which would be suitable for a non technical person to be able to do?

Really appreciate any guidance before I jump in with both feet 🙂

Thanks

Mark

Answer 1

Some of the main advantages of MVC: Clean HTML, No ViewState written on the page, easier to support html5 and thus SEO as well.

For me, since I used MVC 3 years ago I don’t even want to touch WebForms thesedays.

Btw, if you want CMS + MVC, why not use Orchard rather than building yourself?

http://paulmason.biz/?p=118