Technology Architecture

Morphfolia specifically targets the Microsoft ASP.NET platform.  Its focus is on accessible ‘out-of-the-box’ capabilities (such as the Role and Membership which came with version 2 of ASP.NET), mainstream building blocks (the Microsoft Enterprise Libraries) and MS SQL.

More extended capabilities offered by product suites such as MOSS and BizTalk are avoided as I wanted to keep the foot-print and number of dependencies as small as possible. 

The intent of this is to make installation and management as easy as possible, and provide a platform that was readily accessible and widely appealing.

Another specific requirement which fed into this was the ability to host externally with independent ISPs; anything that wasn’t out-of-the-box would either make external hosting more difficult or more expensive. Morphfolia achieves this, and is also well suited to work as part of a local area network.

Core Architecture

The architecture of Morphfolia specifically separates the four base elements of any web site:

• Pages (site structure)
• Content
• Page Layout
• Visual design

Content is separated from pages so that it can be re-used, this makes content easier to control and manage.

Page layout is also separated out; whilst page layouts in Morphfolia are similar to ‘templates’ (in that they offer the ability to balance flexibility with consistency) they aren’t physically part of the page.

A page can have its layout changed without any technical (coding) knowledge.

Visual design is encapsulated within Skins and CSS sheets, and as these are separated they can be mixed with various page layouts.

Skins act as a wrapper around the page layouts in a sort of ‘sandwich’ approach, which is fairly simple but very flexible.  More challenging (and technically immersive) designs can be implemented by designing skins and page layouts that work together; either approach is valid and both and explicitly catered for in the architecture of Morphfolia.

Component Architecture

I'll provide much more info on this soon, but for now, here's a look at the assembilies that make up the core system, and their dependancies on each other (not sure if I have the arrows the right way around?  Everything references the "Common" assembly).

Architecture – Data Architecture

More info to come soon, but for now, here's a look at the logical data model, and the main areas of information within each area.  This only covers structured data at this stage.