In the interests of full disclosure, I will first admit that I am primarily a Microsoft-developer-type person in my “day job”.

However, in my alter ego, I am a outdoor photojournalist. I have been running an online magazine/blog for about a year now, using my own custom code, running the site on Windows 2000 server, ASP/VB .NET 2.0, SQL Server 2000 (but NO FrontPage, thank you very much...). I’ve been doing it this way because I had the tools available, and it looked like a cheaper way to go, but I have come to the realization that I’m spending waaaayyyy too much time on programming, not nearly enough time on content, and am still not satisfied with the way the site works.

So I’ve decided to convert to a blogging tool or CMS of some sort. I’ve already purchased and installed Movable Type 3.3 based on a friend’s recommendations, but have not started a conversion in earnest yet. In a minor fit of buyer’s remorse, I did a search on Wikipedia, and wound up here. I really like the feature set of EE, and am considering bailing on Movable Type and the Shareware discussion forum software I got earlier.

A couple of questions:

- Do you have a competitor product upgrade pricing program available for cnverting from Movable Type?

- Is it possible to incorporate .NET 2.0 ASPX pages into EE templates? I’m not talking master pages, I just have some applications that store data in the SQL Server database, and they use a few of the .NET web controls, ADO, and code-behind pages. Or would I have to convert them to PHP/Perl?

Thanks - You have a great looking product!

Sure, if you decide to switch I’ll make give you a deal. Just and reference this post.

I’m going to say that most likely you won’t be able to run .NET ASPX pages in EE templates. EE templates are run completely through a php engine so unless you did some major funky customization to somehow parse out what is ASPX vs. what is standard EE its unlikely.

However, what you could do is use something like iframes to pull in your ASPX for display on EE pages. You could do something similar with RSS feeds or XML that would let you display something. You could also send data to an ASPX script just using standard html forms like you would on a normal web pages. But again, this isn’t real integration but may meet your needs.

I seem to recall seeing some articles about using both together some how, but I never read them as .NET is not anything I ever had need or interest to use.  I doubt that whatever the solution was is any more intuitive than what Les suggested.  I would, however, point out that if your primary reason to begin using a publishing system is to save yourself time and effort in the long run, that it would seem prudent to not hang on to any remnants of your old solutions.  Your up front effort might be a bit more, but you’ll be happier in the long run, if for example, you create a plugin or module to interface with your other database tables.

Derek Jones - 15 September 2006 05:09 PM

I seem to recall seeing some articles about using both together some how, but I never read them as .NET is not anything I ever had need or interest to use.  I doubt that whatever the solution was is any more intuitive than what Les suggested.  I would, however, point out that if your primary reason to begin using a publishing system is to save yourself time and effort in the long run, that it would seem prudent to not hang on to any remnants of your old solutions.  Your up front effort might be a bit more, but you’ll be happier in the long run, if for example, you create a plugin or module to interface with your other database tables.

Couldn’t agree more...but it’s a learning curve vs. time to market thing. I figure if I can get most of my static content converted over quickly, and at least get functional with some of the dynamic content, I can take my time converting the rest. All new stuff would be under the EE framework.

Thanks for the quick replies…

As noted there is no simple means for PHP and ASP.NET to talk. You’d have to hack some sort of feed. The following should work as a simplistic method:

http://mysite.com/ (EE PHP site)
http://legacy.mysite.com/ (ASPX site)

Then in your EE template:

This will request page1.aspx from the legacy.mysite.com webserver (which could be another machine entirely) and return the generated HTML.
Things would get a bit more fiddly if you needed to do form interaction.

Alternatively (more work) you could do COM Interop. See http://www.timheuer.com/blog/archive/2007/03/10/14009.aspx. But it’s a nasty path to go down.