I'm new to MVC but am working hard to find my way through it. I'm currently at the point where I know enough to be dangerous, but not quite enough to actually do anything useful.
I'm building a site which I'd like to be very flexibly "skinable". It could also end up quite large, so I really want to use areas.
- I found this great article about skinning.
- and this great thread on writing a custom view engine that is "area aware".
I'm thinking of throwing myself in the deep end and seeing if I can build a custom view engine that is both area aware and has theme support. I guess that it's kind of a hybrid of these two articles.
Before I start - and also, more to the point - "before I start, lose hair, finish, implement and build my massive app on it", can anyone comment if they think that this is a good idea?
I'm just wondering if there's a library out there that already does this, or a much easier way that I'm completely missing...
Any suggestions most welcome!!
Thanks in advance,
Z
If you're going to do something, it's generally a good idea to have a good reason to do it.
If you're objective is to enable themes, the easiest way to do this is to set the theme in viewData and have a custom HtmlHelper include the necessary .css and .js references based on the viewdata's theme key.
For a more robust solution, Telerik has an open source extension of ASP.NET MVC, which is very useful for developing your UI and enables theme-functionality : http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-mvc . Using their starter kit would probably save you a good bit of time.