Is umbraco the right choice for a customer portal?

my next assignments is to build 2 information portals for customers. These portals will be login protected sites and contain a set of pages displaying information like orders, invoices, pdf-files ... for the authenticated user (all presented as lists with links to detail pages). The users and the data are stored in an Oracle database. The portals differ in some of the features and in the layout.

My standard approach is to build an individual ASP.net Web Application for every portal.

But this is not the best way to get something reusable. So for these two projects my idea is to create a set of WCF services to get the Data from the Oracle database and to build user controls to display the different elements in Umbraco. This way I hope to get a set of independent, reusable “modules” which can be used to build these portals.

Now my question: is Umbraco a good platform for this type of projects? And is my “concept” a valid approach?

Kind reg开发者_StackOverflowards

Volkmar

Umbracois very flexible. ON the one hand there is the question about security: With Umbraco you can use any Membership Provider you want for all visitors ( also with member roles).

On the other hand you have the question of the integration: With Umbraco you can create usercontrols, xslts or razor files as macros (which can be seen as the reusable modules).

For Xslt you can implement your own XsltExtension which pulls the external content as XPathNodeIterator you can use in every Xslt macro. For ascx files or razor you can use LinQ2Umbraco, your own objects etc to connect to the oracle database.

You also can use some sort of caching functionality to reduce the db-calls. On the other hand is one of the biggest advantages that Umbraco stores all the content as xml and object tree in memmory. So it is very fast in content rendering. With every database call you are loosing a little bit of this advantage.

hth, Thomas

Ruben Verbourgh began the Oracle4Umbraco project to create an abstracted fork for the Datalayer to support running on an Oracle DB. You can find it at http://oracle4umbraco.codeplex.com/, although it has no active releases, so build from source and YMMV.

Volkmar, your concept is perfectly sound - although you might want to consider using the Umbraco data store as the persistence layer for your data rather than in the Oracle DB itself. You get XML content versioning, caching, and all the benefits of the content-management side of things, in a robust and flexible framework which you can expose to other apps later should you so need to, through the Umbraco APIs and web services.

HTH,

Benjamin

content management of website becomes simplified with Umbraco. But if you are planning to use Oracle as backend, Umbraco does not have support for it. So decide carefully as to what parameters can be compromised. Good luck.