The purpose of this story is to unify all the pages created so far under one template, so that common areas don’t have to be duplicated across all the pages and can be edited one time. ASP.NET provides a nice facility called Master Pages, which involves setting up a page that serves as a template, with specific content areas that are customizable in each page. Then, all the pages need to inherit from this master page, and put their custom content in special tags which delineate the custom sections specified in the master page.
It’s not very mind blowing, but it’s very effective and useful. I didn’t run into any problems doing this — it just was a bit of manual editing that needed to be done after I made a basic template.
Keep in mind that the template is not really designed to look very good at this point — I just wanted placeholders for a header, navigation, primary content, secondary content, and footer. I’d like the navigation to be determined in the master page by determining the user role(s), so the only sections that should more or less be the same across all pages are the header and footer.
This will make it easier later on when I really try to do something with the UI, and it was good to do this early on rather than after I had 20-30 pages created already.
