Setup & Configuration

Prerequisites

ElasticWCM does not require you to start a new web site project, though you can do that if you want. The usual path is to have your existing ASP.NET web site modified for ElasticWCM content management. The advantage of this approach is that you can design your web site any way you like, implementing all kinds of business related functionality, and then just mark page regions that you want to become editable fields with ElasticWCM controls. You can convert your existing ASP.NET web site to a modern enterprise-grade web content management system without writing any code!

This walkthrough explains how to do that.

So, to use ElasticWCM you need to have an existing ASP.NET web site project (or a web application project) or create a new one.

Note that we are talking about classic ASP.NET, current version of ElasticWCM does not work with MVC projects yet. (Stay tuned for MVC, SharePoint and more, we'll release it soon!)

Start with web.config file in your development machine

Sign In into the Dashboard and navigate to "Environments & Keys" page. The page displays list of environments configured for your subscription. Depending on the subscription level each environment might have one or two Configuration Keys: for Editable Access and for Read-only Access.

If you configure your web site for Editable Access authorized users will be able to edit content of the site pages. This is the configuration used for Free Community subscription, Introductory and Professional subscriptions.

Read-only Access means that the site content cannot be edited. This is the recommended and most secure configuration for public web sites using Small Business subscription (and above). In this case you would use an internally deployed clone of the public web site configured for Editable Access. You would do content management using internal site which is not accessible from the Internet, while publicly accessible site would be secured from accidental or malicious content changes.

To configure your web site copy selected Configuration Key from the "Environments & Keys" page and paste it inside <appSettings> element in the web.config file of your web site.

Here is an example of how that might look:

This is all you need to configure connection between your web site and ElasticWCM cloud-based content management system.

Next step is to download and reference the ElasticWCM.Client.dll in your Visual Studio project.