Creating custom content sections with umbraco

Question

I'm working on an umbraco website just now and one of the requirements is to have a custom section in the back end that can be used to manage publish smaller micro-sites.

I have been able to create the new section and added some nodes to it. What I can't get to work is publishing them and making them viewable at the correct url.

As an example, say i have created a new section called microsite, inside that there is a folder called myportfolio. this should route to something like www.myumbracosite.com/microsite/myportfolio.

Does anyone know how to get this sort of thing working? Is it even possible to publish content from outsite of the main content section?

Any help would be greatly apprechiated.

Kind Regards Colin G

Answer 1

From my understanding the custom sections are for linking to custom databases or data somewhere that needs an interface.

That said, you can use UrlRewriting and an existing content page with a macro to do something like that.

If you had a page called microsite, then using UrlRewriting you could make the parameter passed in to microsite.aspx (a content page in Umbraco) be "myportfolio".

With a user control on the microsite template it could display some content from your external database (or wherever your custom section stores it).

Not sure that's what you're looking for...

Why are you trying to create a new section for more content? The current Umbraco content area has all kinds of permissions for both users and members. Are the microsites all in the same install of Umbraco?

Another option is that the custom section could simply be used as a setup wizard for the new sites. You could create new content and users in their normal places and just use the new section to create them. It's not too hard to create content from C#, so it would probably be the same as doing it from a user control.

Could you provide a little more info?