Escc.EastSussexGovUK

This project provides the template and some sitewide features for www.eastsussex.gov.uk. It includes the following features:

• Sitewide design
  • Applying the sitewide design with ASP.NET Core MVC
  • Applying the sitewide design with ASP.NET MVC5
  • Applying the sitewide design with ASP.NET WebForms
• Newsletter signup in the sitewide header
• Text size control in the sitewide header
• Google Analytics support
• Google Tag Manager support
• Google Maps support
• Promotional banners
• Web chat
• YouTube support
• Redirects and custom errors
• RSS feed styles
• Pop-up tips for form controls (used for GDPR compliance)
• Rewriting links to email addresses
• Privacy banner (used for GDPR compliance)
• Catalogue machines in public libraries

The role of Escc.EastSussexGovUK.TemplateSource

Our website is made up of several subdomains. Escc.EastSussexGovUK.TemplateSource is the root application of our website on each subdomain, except where the subdomain is a run by a third-party application.

However, the main part of our site runs Umbraco which also needs to be configured to be the root application. To resolve this conflict the Umbraco site integrates the Escc.EastSussexGovUK.TemplateSource application in two ways:

• Escc.EastSussexGovUK.TemplateSource publishes a NuGet package which is installed in the Umbraco application, containing the static files which must by convention appear at the root of the website, and containing Escc.EastSussexGovUK.TemplateSource.dll so that pages from Escc.EastSussexGovUK.TemplateSource can run within the context of the Umbraco application and find the code they expect.
• The Umbraco application has virtual directories set up which point to folders within Escc.EastSussexGovUK.TemplateSource (masterpages, img and css\images, and escc.eastsussexgovuk to point to the root of Escc.EastSussexGovUK.TemplateSource), so that those folders appear to be within the Umbraco application. The Umbraco application also adds the URLs ~/escc.eastsussexgovuk/ and ~/masterpages to its umbracoReservedPaths setting in web.config.

This makes it possible for the Umbraco application to serve the remote master page using code and configuration from Escc.EastSussexGovUK.TemplateSource, preserving some of the URLs expected by the files in Escc.EastSussexGovUK.TemplateSource even though they are running from a different application. These URLs are also preserved from a previous implementation of the website, which aided migration.

Development setup steps

1. From an Administrator command prompt, run app-setup-dev.cmd to set up a site in IIS
2. Replace sample values in web.config with ones appropriate to your setup
3. Replace sample values in js\config.js with ones appropriate to your setup
4. Build the solution