ASP.NET 3.5 Website Programming: Problem-Design-Solution

Chapter 5. News and Article Management

The example site is basically a container for content targeted to beer, food, and pub enthusiasts. Content can be in the form of news, articles, reports of special events, reviews, photo galleries, and so forth. This chapter describes the typical content-related problems that should be considered for a site of this type. You'll then design and develop an online article manager that allows the complete management of the site's content, in terms of acquiring articles; adding, activating, and removing articles; sharing articles with other parties, and so on.

Problem

Different sites use different methods of gathering news and information: some site administrators hunt for news events and write their own articles, while others get news and articles directly from their users (a great example of this is the Add Your News link at www.aspwire.com) or they rely upon a company whose business is to gather and organize news to be sold to third-party sites. In the old days, some sites did screen-scraping, retrieving data from an external site's page and showing it on their pages with a custom appearance (of course, you must have the authorization from the external company and you must know the format they use to show the news on their pages). During the last few years, we've seen an explosion in the use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a simple XML format for syndicating content, making it available to other clients. Atom is another XML-based syndication ...