extend whole website in asp.net

I'm looking for best practices and good ideas rather than a proper solution.

scenario: I work in a web agency and thus we are plenty of websites from several customers. They're built upon a cms we made, so websites are quite identical for the 90% of code. However, remaining 10% struggles me and my team as it involves not only the presentation layer but behavioral logics too (ex: a website1 requires simply user/pass registration while website2 needs more data, facebook connector, etc. But this is a very easy example).

Making ad hoc development for our custo开发者_运维知识库mers is becoming painful as keep each version aligned is getting really hard for us

What I really dream to have is an extendible website that works by itself, but in which I can override a part. This behavior should sound like "look for the specific part, if it doesn't exists get the base one". The parts could be a method, a class, a page, a control, a static file.

example:

Suppose I want website2 to have an own login component, let's so imagine that we have a situation like:

/website_base
  |_ login.aspx

/website1

/website2
  |_ login.aspx

So, if I ask for www.website1.com I'll get /website_base/login.aspx, but if I ask for www.website2.com I'll get /website2/login.aspx

Any idea?

Thanks

PS: we work with asp.net 3.5 framework.

There are couple of ways to achieve this.

Approach 1: 1. Split the common functionality in modules and create a pluggable structure. (like DotNetNuke) Obviously this will be more time consuming initially but over the period of time it can make itself like a product.

Approach 2:

1. Firstly - I would create separate solution for each client for better maintainability. This will save me a lot of hassle while maintaining the source control and when one client comes back with issues and we have multiple releases for a single client.

2. Secondly - From my core solution, I will identify most commonly used artifacts for each layers and move them to a core assembly. a. For example – In UI you can use themes to give different looks for each client. Have a default master page which comes with the core site structure. All client specific details like Logo, name, contact details etc… can be configured using some DB fields. b. In Business Layer and Data Access Layer – core functionalities like Membership, Logging, CMS related Entities etc I would have as a dll i. I will derive my client specific logic from these core classes.

3. Last but not the least – how you deploy your code and how your IIS VD structure looks like… I believe it will be totally dependent on how the solution is packaged.. I would create a deployment package for each client which will give them the ability to deploy it to any server wherever they want until you have specific issues about proprietary software hosting.

Look into ASP.NET MVC. It is much more extensible than Web Forms, can be integrated into your existing Web Forms application, and it is very easy to build reusable custom components like what you are describing.

Otherwise, I would suggest looking into WebParts and developing reusable custom server controls for the components that you need. This way you can encapsulate the complex functionality within a single UI control without having to write repetitive code. WebParts are also compatible with Personalization, which you can leverage to manage the variance between which sites use which controls.

I definitely recommend MVC as the way to go for building extensible .NET web applications, but learning a new technology always incurs a cost in the time it takes to understand the new paradigm. I hope this helps you.

I found a smart solution here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/ASP2UserControlLibrary.aspx

Check it out