ASP .net CMS options (Umbraco, Dotnetnuke)

dmx07 · 9 Feb 2011 at 10:01

Hi all,

I wondered if anyone has opinions on which of these content management systems is best. Does anyone has personal experience with either? We are looking for a good platform on which to build both small and large websites, blogs, eCommerce capability (not full scale eCommerce as we have another platform for those sites) etc.

From what I understand DNN is more widely used but Umbraco is gaining strength. It will be used by our ASP .Net developers but also designers with CSS & html.

I found a good comparison here but just wanted to see if anyone here has any thoughts.

daz · 9 Feb 2011 at 10:07

Is there any particular reason why only ASP .Net CMSs? In my experience Umbraco is incredibly heavyweight and inefficient and doesn't do anything which can't be done in a PHP based CMS like Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress or Modx.

dmx07 · 9 Feb 2011 at 10:45

daz said:
Is there any particular reason why only ASP .Net CMSs? In my experience Umbraco is incredibly heavyweight and inefficient and doesn't do anything which can't be done in a PHP based CMS like Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress or Modx.

We have used WordPress and personally I love it but our coders are ASP .Net so when I'm building sites in WordPress have very little support when I need to do the more complex things. I've been singing the PHP tune to my colleagues for a while now but they're not interested! :-(

We build a lot of bespoke sites & applications using ASP .Net and just need a decent CMS for the smaller sites.

Jammin1984 · 9 Feb 2011 at 13:42

dmx07 said:
We have used WordPress and personally I love it but our coders are ASP .Net so when I'm building sites in WordPress have very little support when I need to do the more complex things. I've been singing the PHP tune to my colleagues for a while now but they're not interested!

We build a lot of bespoke sites & applications using ASP .Net and just need a decent CMS for the smaller sites.

DotNetNuke is heavy, awful, injects ****e and should just be banned. Imo. I despise it. It makes integrating pure HTML a pain and developing for it is slow and tedious.

Umbraco is a lot lighter, flys when served up has a good community. You can now export your Document Types to a DataContext class giving you LINQ over Umbraco which is really nice for quick development. It also makes integrating pure HTML a doddle. Ive done a couple of Umbraco sites recently at work using this MVP pattern implementation to facilitate TDD and as far as .NET CMS go i personally think its your best call.

There is also Orchard CMS, which is ASP.NET MVC but isnt very mature yet. Umbraco are planning on making version 5.x support ASP.NET MVC based so we shall see what happens between these two.

daz said:
Is there any particular reason why only ASP .Net CMSs? In my experience Umbraco is incredibly heavyweight and inefficient and doesn't do anything which can't be done in a PHP based CMS like Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress or Modx.

Not too sure I can agree with this. Umbraco loads the entire site structure into XML. This XML is then cached by IIS making rapid! As long as the site isnt very write heavy then its really bloody quick and far from inefficient, the cached XML reduces DB calls by a fair chunk.

RockLobster · 9 Feb 2011 at 16:21

We've used Umbraco for a few years now. Fantastic CMS, lots of support from the community and developers and easy to work with.

dmx07 · 9 Feb 2011 at 16:34

RockLobster said:
We've used Umbraco for a few years now. Fantastic CMS, lots of support from the community and developers and easy to work with.

We have been trialling Umbraco and just can't get it to do what we want. I haven't personally tried it but our tech-director was saying how un-intuitive it was and even doing simple things (adding pages) didn't work - maybe there is something simple we are missing!

I've been looking at DNN today and watching some videos. It looks quite good albeit a steep learning curve (like anything I guess)... Will stick with it for now and maybe have a look at Orchard as recommended above, from what I've seen I like the look of it, quite like WordPress.

dmx07 · 11 Feb 2011 at 16:36

Anyone know how easy it is to convert a normal HTML/CSS template into an Umbraco site? There are so few decent Umbraco templates out there I'm thinking the best method for knocking out small budget websites will be to adapt html templates but of course these templates will need to be converted to work within Umbraco...