Gwen:

We're just finishing a project that's very much like this.  We did it by creating a "page" outside the Start Page, which has all sorts of sub pages underneath it.  Those subpages are used as "fetching targets" from other pages.

Let me know if I'm understanding you right.

Deane

Gwen:

This could be a scenario where it's possible to use the "Property from other page" Dynamic Content plugin which is included in CMS 5 R2 and above. That is, if you want editors to be able to include this content when and if they want. Perhaps that's what Deane is using.

The other "classic" way of using these types of "settings pages" is to store site-wide information like contact information that goes in the footer or data that is more of settings type which you use from codebehind rather than display to the user. This practice is prefered over using dynamic properties because overusing dynamic properties is bad for performance (there are other reasons too, security/administrative and others). The two concepts can be combined, so that a dynamic property is used to point to different settings pages for different parts of the site.

Maybe use the DDS with a simple admin page?

Actually, in this project, the pages are so deriviative between sites (there are 86 sites), that we have full pages and we use the "Fetch Data" functionality to grab the entire pagee.  For something more modular, the "Page Property" dynamic content would be the way to go.

For global things like header and footer information, we do usually do those as properties on the Start Page.  We wrote a little class called "GlobalContent" that we grab a property from the StartPage, so you can use it bind things in the master page:

CustomerServicePhoneNnumber.Text = GlobalContent.Get("CsPhoneNo");

OverheadLinks.DataSource = GlobalContent.Get("OverheadLinkCollection");
OverheadLinks.DataBind();

Hi Gwen

I would consider using EPiServer Composer or Flexigrid for this.

Good luck!

Frederik

thanks for all the advice. Very much appreciated.  What I have tried is creating a "dynamic library" set of pages and sub pages outside of teh website i think like Deane has done.  I am planning on using the search function to create a start page that will make it a bit more user friendly.

Thanks

Gwen