umbraco5

Umbraco 5 newb: Content from custom Table

I am currently investigating the possibilities of different CMSs for a company-site. Done quite a few projects in classical ASP, ASP.NET, Joomla etc..

I would like to use Umbraco 5 for the first time.

For that project we have a SQL-Table with Job-Opportunities: like: JobName, Department, Description, etc.. These should be listed on a page. In ASP.NET I would use something like a Repeater, etc.. with PageSize option and automatic paging. In the Backend (Backoffice in Umbraco, I assume) there has to be an Insert/Edit/Delete Page with the corresponding input boxes, which are maintained by the company employees, not by web-developers.

Which route should I look at? I am completely stuck, is there an example anywhere? Can I use my own data-tables, or could/should I use the Umbraco content tables for this?

Thank you, Reinhard

Solution

  • Welcome to Umbraco.

    If you choose to use a pre-existing database, you're going to need the following pieces:

    1. an ORM to access read/write the data
    2. a custom hive provider for that data to allow for Umbrace to read it as an entity
    3. a custom tree to allow for editing and adding data in the backoffice
    4. a macro to display the content on the frontend.

    http://web-matters.blogspot.com/2011/11/umbraco-5-hive-provider-tree-editor.html is a great place to start.

    As you're probably picking up on, this is a lot of work.. so, most importantly: Are you trying to maintain two applications?

    If so, do you really need to be able to edit the list in both applications? Your task would be much simpler if you only allowed editing from the other application, and displayed the read-only list using web services.

    If not, ditch the custom database. Umbraco 5 is a full EAV/CR system, so unlike some CMS products, you'll be able to represent any rdbs structure you can imagine. The simplest way would be to create a custom document type with those properties to represent a job opportunity, and store those job opportunities on a new node in the content tab.

    About document types: http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/how-tos/working-with-document-types