Guidelines for Customization

Here are a few guidelines to follow when customizing Singlefront.

Tracking Changes

You should keep track of all custom code changes made to the Singlefront code-base using a source control system like Visual Source Safe, SVN, CVS, etc. This will allow you to merge in changes when you upgrade to a newer version of Singlefront.
Znode uses Subversion (SVN) and Tortoise for our internal source control - We highly recommend this system. You can find out more about SVN at: subversion.tigris.org

Data Access

Always add custom data access methods to the ZNode.Libraries.DataAccess.Custom library. Do not modify the strongly typed data access layer by hand as it will potentially break compatibility for future versions.
Add separate tables in the database instead of modifying existing tables if possible. This will ensure that you don't break the compatibility with the data access libraries.
If you need to add columns to existing tables then set them as null-able columns - this will ensure backward compatibility with the data access libraries

Miscellaneous

Always use the "~/" syntax to reference images and pages. This will ensure the correct reference paths when you move the framework to a hosted environment.

 


See Also:

Upgrading the Singlefront