Introduction to Bluesite
Bluesite is an Open Source system for building and managing ASP.NET websites. Some would call it a CMS other would call it an advanced file manger, it think it is something in between. The idea behind Bluesite is actually very simple. Bluesite is a webapplication that you can use to edit the files on your webserver with. But it is not just a dump notepad on the internet. Bluesite recognises the filetype and provides guidance in editing them. For example does it recognise .aspx files and knows how to edit the metadata or the special aspx tags used by .net to indicate cache and other things. Another example is the web.config file. It can be hard to remember the precise syntax for all the options that is controlled by the web.config file. Bluesite can help you with that by providing a user-friendly interface. Besides that you can also mark places in the aspx file as sections, these sections will be managed by Bluesite modules. The only thing that the modules do is inserting text in the aspx file. The text can be normal inline html, or it can insert a webcontrol declaration for a forum or something else.
ASP.NET v2 is coming soon, a it gives, among a lot of other things, the possibility to use masterpages. Masterpages is like templates, which means that you easily can make a change that is reflected on all you webpages.
As you can see it's a different approach than most other CMS do, and that's why I don't call it a CMS… on the other side CMS is overused and can mean almost everything. :-)
Bluesite features:
- Integrates seamlessly into an existing standard asp.net website
- Uses standard asp.net technology
- Very flexible
- Easy integration with other web applications
- Open Source under BSD license
- And a lot of other things :-)