Big Mess, what should I do?

[Craig]

I'm a C# forms programmer, don't know alot about web programming, and I've
been thrown on a web project and it seems like a mess, I wanted some
direction. The current web site is hosted on unix and is just plone, an
open source content management system. They've put alot of work into
configuring the plone site, but now they want to create a new site in ASP.net
with all of the functionality of the old site and then some. So, they want
to reuse alot of the plone stuff, but they're suggesting stuff like "Create
the site in ASP.net and then just use frames to stick in the plone pages
within a frame, etc". So, a couple questions: 1st any comments...plea se
give them, 2nd How could I reuse some of these plone pages within an ASP site
without using Frames? 3rd Security is a big issue too, because Plone has
it's own login using http authentication, how do I integrate that?

[Karl Seguin]

Not knowing anything about Plone other than it's a CMS written on Zope, I'd
say, from what you've told us, it is a mess. You haven't given us any
reasons why you'd want to move to ASP.Net. If all that's suggested it to
use the existing site and wrap it in ASP.Net, what is the ASP.Net part
contributing to all of this? the "new functionality"?

Can you just have the existing functionality serviced by the existing Plone
with links to ASP.net pages for the new functionality.. .and links back...

<a href="/home">Home</a> - <a href="register. aspx">Register</a>

where home is a Plone page and obviously Register.aspx is a .net page?

In other words, side by side instead of one wrapping the other.

karl

--
MY ASP.Net tutorials
http://www.openmymind.net/ - New and Improved (yes, the popup is
annoying)
http://www.openmymind.net/faq.aspx - unofficial newsgroup FAQ (more to
come!)
"Craig" <Cr***@discussi ons.microsoft.c om> wrote in message
news:84******** *************** ***********@mic rosoft.com...

I'm a C# forms programmer, don't know alot about web programming, and I've
been thrown on a web project and it seems like a mess, I wanted some
direction. The current web site is hosted on unix and is just plone, an
open source content management system. They've put alot of work into
configuring the plone site, but now they want to create a new site in
ASP.net
with all of the functionality of the old site and then some. So, they
want
to reuse alot of the plone stuff, but they're suggesting stuff like
"Create
the site in ASP.net and then just use frames to stick in the plone pages
within a frame, etc". So, a couple questions: 1st any comments...plea se
give them, 2nd How could I reuse some of these plone pages within an ASP
site
without using Frames? 3rd Security is a big issue too, because Plone has
it's own login using http authentication, how do I integrate that?

[Tom wilson]

Holy can of worms. I'd suggest they make up their minds, it's one or
the other. Any time I've tried to mix technologies like you're
describing I end up spending more time fighting with that than it
would take to simply re-write the app from scratch. Especially if I
don't know the existing technology that well. I'm not sure how Plone
works but if it's a scipting language that can be embedded into aspx
pages then it's possible to do without frames. But if Plone pages are
specifically independant then hmm... I'd still re-write.

Just my 2c.

(recently our admin was asked to post a simple calendar logging app
for the web. He's now spent a solid week fighting with PHP, Perl,
CURL and god knows what else. I'll give him a few more days before I
just spend the 1-2 days it'll take to write the app from scratch in
asp.net :)
On Thu, 28 Apr 2005 10:08:10 -0700, "Craig"
<Cr***@discussi ons.microsoft.c om> wrote:

I'm a C# forms programmer, don't know alot about web programming, and I've
been thrown on a web project and it seems like a mess, I wanted some
direction. The current web site is hosted on unix and is just plone, an
open source content management system. They've put alot of work into
configuring the plone site, but now they want to create a new site in ASP.net
with all of the functionality of the old site and then some. So, they want
to reuse alot of the plone stuff, but they're suggesting stuff like "Create
the site in ASP.net and then just use frames to stick in the plone pages
within a frame, etc". So, a couple questions: 1st any comments...plea se
give them, 2nd How could I reuse some of these plone pages within an ASP site
without using Frames? 3rd Security is a big issue too, because Plone has
it's own login using http authentication, how do I integrate that?