Note: I originally posted this on ServerFault, but I haven’t gotten any responses at all. Since it looks like I’m on track to get the Tumbleweed badge over there, I figured I would try here also.
Our existing public website consists of a mish-mash of asp.net pages with mostly static content and some real web applications that are set up as virtual directories. We’re now looking at installing Umbraco, which requires that you install it at the root of the website.
Since the CMS would be at the root of the website, I’m assuming it’s a bad idea to run our existing pages and web applications underneath Umbraco (due to the URL rewriting it performs and inheriting web.config settings, etc.) So how do we make everything co-exist peacefully both while we transition to the CMS and after we’re finished?
My only idea so far was to set up the CMS and the applications as separate websites and then use some sort of URL rewriting/reverse proxy to make everything resolve correctly:
* www.example.com would keep resolving to our old homepage
* www.example.com/dept1 would keep resolving to the old dept1 page
* www.example.com/dept2 would resolve to the new dept2 page on the CMS
* www.example.com/app would resolve to an existing web application
We ending up setting up Umbraco as it’s own website in IIS and then we bought ISAPI Rewrite so that we could seamlessly pass through CMS content for certain URLs.