My boss is gone and left me a CMS.

Hello!

I've been working as an xhtml/asp front-end developer for a year now in a small company. My boss decided to leave and I'm basically taking over the web development department!! Fantastic for me, but he left me with a somewhat buggy (yet stable) CMS which he built in classic asp with xml.

Now I need to analyze and (eventually) understand the full workings of this CMS so that I can support it and hopefully improve it in the future.

Do you have any recommendation of how to analyze an application which you didn't build? Any methods, tools or ideas you could think of?

Thanks!

I'm not familiar with any tools and personally never had to do such thing,
but if I were you I would start with the home page and read the source
code line by line. when hitting something new to me, I would go and crack
this before moving on. for example suppose I see such line:

I would search what does the ":" mean before going on.

after the home page is clear, I would learn any page related to the home page,
and any related code such as included files.

It is simple , you first need to understand fully the systems before going into codes. Go through the front end and understand the total working. Wherever you don't understand the logic behind any event go to the code and understand that. Many a times I do have to debug programs which have been done by people who have left us. So my advice is to spend some time playing on the application

What does the ":" do?