Cross-discipline blog development

My pal Steve Smith a few years ago used a neat approach for managing dynamic layout on client sites publishing to his ASPAlliance site. He'd have registered authors call a .NET web service that returned HTML markup constituting the layout for his site. If he ever needed to change the UI, it was retrofitted across client pages. It's a smart way to emulate user controls for remote clients. Even though Steve's work involved strictly .NET clients, I always kept this standards-based approach in mind as a clever implementation of a way to use remote data sources in pages.

I'm using this mentality to manage a new series of blogs I'm going to have to build. A manager's meeting the other day proposed a new series of blog-based products we'll be debuting this year, which would normally be major development time. Since I've got a custom blog application written in ASP.NET 1.x already in and in production, I'm avoiding rebuilding most of the initial infrastructure. So I'm looking past most of the tough, repetitive structural programming and getting with the UI and administrative elements. I don't mind doing presentation stuff in ASP.NET, but doing admin pages and maintenance tools gets tiring.

The finished blog will be published on IIS, but I'm rolling an internal publishing tool using open source web frameworks. A couple of admin interfaces are based on Ruby on Rails scaffolding and some other internal UI/URL management stuff with Django.

The kicker is mapping the in-place database schema for the tables controlling data in the existing blog app. The Django and RoR pages contain client- and server-side code calling .NET-driven AJAX functions and web services to executable processes and data streams, respectively. I can use the rapid development and auto code generation features of the open source frameworks with the .NET back-end stuff I'm used to building pretty quickly in C#. And the end result are .ASPX pages displaying blog posts, comments and generating RSS feeds.

So ultimately, the blog is based on a ASP.NET front-end and .NET mid-tier logic, powered by open source utilities for all the publishing. Clear as mud?