Overview

A very common question from CMS users is, "How do I include dynamic data in my CMS application?" This data could come from other systems or straight from an external database. Often, there's a need to include this content as part of a template or a posting. However, this question is often posed in the context of how someone would integrate an application with CMS existing ASP or ASP.NET pages that contain some unique functionality. Fundamentally, there isn't a straight answer. The decision of whether to integrate an existing application or dynamically display context inside of a CMS template needs further investigation.

In this chapter, we'll provide a framework for helping you decide how and what to include in a CMS-based application. We'll demonstrate a few examples of how to update placeholders with an external data source and how to simply display that content on a template.