Carrotware: carrotcake overview

CarrotCake is an Open Source CMS (content management system) built on C# ASP.Net to leverage jQuery UI and TinyMCE. Designed for ease of use for editing pages & incorporating of modules/custom code. This CMS is built on C# and MSSQL Server. There are three versions: ASP.Net 3.5 SP1 WebForms, ASP.Net MVC 5, and ASP.Net Core 8 MVC.

The goal of this CMS is to provide a lightweight platform where modules can be added to a page without having to do anything other than build user controls (webforms) or partial view (mvc) and adding an entry to a control (webforms) or partial view actions + assembly (mvc) list. There are some interfaces for hooking the CMS to have data injected at runtime. Examples of how one might create a widget can be found in the solutions.

We wanted to make it easy to create new templates, all you have to do is take a standard HTML+CSS template, have it inherit from the core content page class, swap out key areas with the CMS's custom controls, save the file as an ASPX (webforms) or CSHTML (mvc), and add to the list of skins. Examples of such templates can be found in the projects which should serve as guide to create your own.

Once widgets (aka your user controls with your custom code) have been added to the widget list, engage the advanced edit and get a WYSIWYG editor and simply drop the widget item into a placeholder. The advanced edit UI provides a floating toolbar that can be minimized (using the - icon) or scooted to the left or right of the browser (using the left or right arrows), to better allow access to the hot spots and previewing the included related content.

Content areas are editable by way of a WYSIWYG editor (powered by TinyMCE), and will allow you to format your text without having to know much (or any) actual HTML programming.

The edit interface has so far been tested in Firefox 92.0+, and Chrome 99.0+, all with Windows 7 & 10 x64. Other browsers/OS are likely supported, but are as yet untested.