Hi!

There are some different ways to accomplish this. It all depends on how much data there is and if the data is the same for the entire site or changes. If you have pretty static data that you still want to be able to change through the ui you can set up some properties on a page type, for instance the start page and thus making it possible to edit and fetch the data from the start page.

If you have data that will change depending on the structure of the site (for instance a top image that are different on different sections) you can add dynamic properties. These can be defined for each page on the site and values are inherited It might be good to know that dynamic properties might have a performance impact if overused for a large site. This issues has been adressed in EPiServer CMS 6 R2 but needs to be considered for CMS 6 R1 and CMS 5 sites.

Regards
Linus Ekström
EPiServer Development Team

Hi Linus,

Data I have in my site are fairly dynamic and less static. Only static part is top images, footer texts, section header images etc. Main section content is dynamic and it comes from another database(apart from the standard database that powers episerver site). I dont want to include dynamic contents in the edit mode, but I need the static parts to be editable and I have lots of such pages that I have imported into episerver site having the same structure I've described.

moreover, please note that the pages I'm importing into episerver cms, are part of a live website and has its own functionalities. I just need to re-use them in my episerver and only give the admin users, the capability of editing the static content. My objective is to run the entire live website through the CMS and edit the static content, without touching dynamic ones.

Ok.

It's still hard to give the best alternative without having more knowledge about how this content relates to the EPiServer content but I can give you some more alternatives to explore:

1. Write a page provider and use the standard editing interface to edit the content and access rights to make sure only admins can edit it. This requires quite a lot of effort so only do this if you have a lot of data to edit and don't want to built you own edit interface.

2. Create your own admin plug-in and build an editing interface for the objects.

3. Use the content channel functionality to import and sync data from an external source.

I'd probably go with number two unless I had a lot of time to spend and really wanted a tight integration to make the content behave as it was EPiServer content.

/Linus