ASP .net CMS options (Umbraco, Dotnetnuke)

[dmx07]

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.

 

[dmx07]

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.

 

[dmx07]

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]

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...