Help. Newbie Questions about ASP Site Redesign

jeffgrundy · 06-07-2012, 05:00 AM

Hello, and thank you in advance for any help you may be able to offer me. I have a membership website for fantasy baseball. A partner of mine designed the site and has since left. The site works fine, but the design is really outdated. I want to redesign the site but have no experience with ASP. I have access to all the files and the database on the server, and would like to move the site to a new server as well. I am an experienced Access/VBA programmer but, like I said, know next to nothing about ASP. So...

1.) How can I tell if the site was written in ASP or ASP.Net? And does it really make a difference?

2.) Is there a WYSIWYG editor or something I could use to redesign the visual aspects of the site while leaving the "includes pages" (i think that's right), code and calls (links) to the database in tact?

3.) If I want to move the site to another server, can I just FTP the database and files to the new server (assuming of course it is a Windows server)?

4.) Do you have any general advice on how to best implement the design changes while not screwing up the code that makes the site work? Also, what are the easiest to use or learn apps (if available) for redesigning the pages n the site?

5.) Best way to move the site? Any special permissions or anything I need to be concerned with?

Thank you so very much for taking the time to review this post. Any advice you could give is greatly appreciated.

miranda · 06-07-2012, 05:11 PM

1.) If it is ASP.Net then the file Extension will be .aspx also ASP.Net pages typically use code behind so there will be seperate code so lets say you have a default.aspx page there is generally either a default.aspx.vb or default.aspx.cs file to go along with it.

If it is Classic ASP the the file extension of the pages will be .asp

2.) this depends on if classic or .net In classic asp sometimes people will have asp code interspersed in the html. Othertimes they may never leave the asp code and write the html code using the server side asp code.

Look for the delimiters <% and %> everything in between is asp code.
Code that is written to the page is done so with Response.Write. If what is being written is in quotes then it is a string which may be html. So Response.Write "<h1>Hello World</h1>" will write the string Hello World in an H1 header. anything written to the screen that is NOT quoted is a variable or a constant. There is a shortcute for writing out Response.Write when it is all you are doing in the delimiter and that is to use the equal sign so <%="Hello World"%> is the same as <% Response.Write "Hello World"%> or <%=myVariable%> is the same as <% Response.Write myVariable%>

3.) depends on the database if it is an acccess database then yes you can copy the entire database and FTP it to the new server. if it is a mySQL or SQL Server database then nope. Just make sure the server supports asp. All Microsoft servers support it. Linux generally does not as it requires a module that most do not have.

4.) If it is classic asp and written in VBScript you may be somewhat familiar with the language as VBA is very similar in that they are both subsets of VB. There will be some methods that are not available because the code is operating on a server and not on the client machine so things like MsgBox will not work. Look at the code and see what is in the delimiters. You can alter anything outside of the asp delimiters. just be prepared for loops etc to sometimes have html code that is written by the server

5.) any saves to the database or updates will require write permissions on the directory (assuming it is an access database). SQL Server is a whole other can of worms.

Also any saves to a text file or uploads to a directory will require write permissions to the directory. Also if ../ are used in the include files then parent paths will need to be enabled in IIS

jeffgrundy · 06-08-2012, 11:49 AM

Wow.. thank you so very much for the very useful information. Learned so much from your post. I truly appreciate you taking the time to reply with such detailed information. It definitely helps point me in the right direction. Once again, thank you very much.