I had some time over the weekend, and made a bunch of progress...

I overcame the styling issues by simply using themes, and apply styles to the menu via the properties. This was much easier than trying to sort out how to use CSS directly. Perhaps I'll go back to that once I'm a little more experienced with these controls.

Next up was adding in Membership & Roles. I want to be able to manage much of the content with out opening Visual Studio, so I need to support logins. I also want to have non-public photo albums, which means I need some roles for the logins. Of course I could just use the SQL providers, but I also want to avoid a database on this site. Thus, my plan was to look for an example Membership Provider, and re-work it to use an XML file for persistance. Conveniently, Microsoft actually has a sample Read Only XML Membership Provider . And they did the Role provider as well. Thanks! That made things go much faster.

Then it was on to integrating the Free Text Box. Again, this was so simple that it suprised me. Now, when I login, I can edit the content on the front page. Ta-dah!

From here, I jumped into the photos section. My plan is to upload the photos into folders on the web server, and then "register" the folder with the application. The registration process will create a "view" version of the photo, as well as a thumbnail. These will be persisted as files on disk to lower the CPU load when viewing the photos (no dynamic thumbnailing).

Rick Strahl had some handy code that does the image re-sizing part. Then it came to persisting the photos into an XML document. For this, I cooked up a simple little set of objects which contain the PhotoCollection, and can be serialized to XML. I left things at a point where I can register a folder via the web page, and it will correctly re-size all the images, and write out the XML file.


Next up - displaying the photos...