Integrate CMS like Umbraco in existing application

Question

We develop very business-case specific applications, but all applications have something in common: some pages or some parts of pages need to be freely content-managed. We often rebuild the same functionality in each application: display and editing of CMS pages.

There must be a better way! Is there any .NET CMS that can be plugged in the way we can in the main application iterate on the available pages and display them using a simple API which outputs HTML, and management of those pages is done in the backoffice / administrative pages of the CMS application.

I would imagine, for example Umbraco, which offers an extensive backoffice. You would in the backoffice be able to add, remove and edit pages. The developer would in code simply use an API like:

UmbracoCms.Core.PageManager.GetPage('CONTENTBLOCK-HOME')

This would for example retrieve the HTML content for a content block on the home page.

Does anything like this exist in the .NET ecosystem, or are there alternative solutions? The basic question is here: How would you add CMS functionality (by preference, already from a well-known CMS like Orchard or Umbraco) into an existing web application without rebuilding and reinventing a wheel each time over and which solutions already exist? What solution would allow plugging in the CMS into the existing application instead of trying to get an existing application to work in a new CMS application?

Answer 1

If you have properly separated application, there would be no problem to integrate it with Orchard as module.

Modules in Orchard are like MVC area so it is like subapplication.

Separate business logic, domain entities and data access to separate libraries which will know nothing about Orchard. Create Orchard module just as presentation layer and as point for registering all your dependencies in Autofac IoC which is used by Orchard.

If your application is improperly designed ... ex .. all business logic is in controller, then you are in trouble.