Hi,

I'm new to CMS so pardon me if what I'm about to ask looks stupid.

For sometime I've been running a dynamic ecommerce web site, written partly in asp and partly in asp.net.

During the years some static content (html, flash etc.) was added to the dynamic pages. This static content serves the purpouse to better contestualize what in the dynamic portions of the pages (product page, order page and so on). (To help you better visualize the layout, let us assume that the page is divided in three parts left, center and right with the dynamic portion in the center and the static portions on its left and right)

Now the time has come to seriously consider the adoption of a cms to handle in a friendlier and more effiencient way the content i mentioned above. This cms should allow to replace the static content while leaving the dynamic portions of the application untouched.

How can i solve the problem? What i imagine as a solution is a cms that leaves the dynamic part of the application untouched, while asking only for the left and right portion of each page to be "cms'able".

Does this approach have sense? is it a common best practice? Are there cms able to let me do this?

Thanks in advance to everyone who will be so kind to give me "pointers".

Should be easy enough.

I guess you're using a sever side include tag to place the dymamic content at the moment so you just have to do the same thing in the CMS.

Most CMS systems are template driven these days so you just have to modify one of the templates they supply. It's probably easier to use a simple CMS rather than one of the big named ones as they have so many features modifying the templates can be more tricky.

www.searchengineoptimizedcms.com might be nice as it's PC based and automatically generates html pages via a template. We've used it to static sections of sites working alongside and integrated with clients dynamic database sites as you require.