Create template for different sites

Hello folks,

My question is two fold.

I am working on new project for a company that maintains 12 web sites. All the data, content is stored in an SQL database and each of the sites gets it data from the same SQL database. An analogy would be a wholeseller sells car parts. He maintains a web application and all his products are stored in his database. He has 12 dealers to whom he offers web sites where the customers of the dealers can make purchases. These purchases are logged into the database of the wholeseller.

1. First requirement is to create different layouts for each web site. The admin of each site would be allowed to make some changes, bgcolor, link color, some text changes and upload logo from a web form. How can I begin to use XML to store the configuration and changes made by the site admin?

2. Second requirement is that the actual pages of all the 12 sites would be essentially the same and stored in one folder. So any changes made by the programmer on the underlying site would be reflected on all 12 sites. This will be an ASP.netApplication hosted on IIS 5. Can anyone give me some ideas on how this can be accomplished? How will IIS be configured and how the ASP.net application should be programmed to read the configuration parameters of each site and display.

I am an ASP developer and have limited .net experience and just started reading about XML, so I would like to hear your ideas on how to go about doing this and where I can find samples of similar projects in ASP.net.

Thanks for your help
Mike

Learning XML is actually easy, especially if you already have some experience in web development, what you're really looking for here is XSL/XSLT.

To make it real short, XSLT is a set of rules that you can use to transform an XML file into any text format as output. Of course, the output we're looking at here will be HTML.

If you work on your stuff pretty well, you can have your 12 sites (12 XML files, all refering to the same XSL) having a different content/layout, while you only have one main structure into your xsl.

I can't really tell you more without starting an xsl tutorial, so I advise you to look for xsl/xslt tutorials on w3cschools or wherever.

PM me if you want more details.

Grtz