Best Business CMS

GaryH-21

GaryH-21

GaryH-21

Associate
Joined
6 May 2011
Posts
470
Hey guys,

I'm going to be working on a project and I need to decide on a CMS. I won't be using a free opensource one as I am going to require 24/7 support.

Most of the website will just be standard, let content editors log in and make their pages with the greatest of ease... although some parts will require custom coding and reading feeds such as XML and CSV feeds... Shared "content blocks" are also essential - e.g have a widget that can be dragged and dropped on to multiple pages.

A few I have looked at so far are Liferay, Sitefinity and EPiServer. We are currently using Vignette (Now OpenText) although it costs far too much as is super slow and buggy...

Has anyone got any other suggestions to look at or have any experience with the ones mentioned?

Cheers :)
 
mp3duck said:
EPiServer for me.
Very expensive licenses, but their support is fantastic. Build a few sites, and find it to very good, and very customisable

But, depending on how big your site is, you may find using Umbraco 4.7 (I wouldn't use 5 yet) a very good option.

I helped build a major car website on Umbraco 4.7 (although we have code than converts the Umbraco site into a flat HTML site).
Click to expand...

Thanks for that. I have actually looked at Umbraco before, but not in great detail, so i'll check that out more for sure.

I was guessing EPiServer was going to be expensive when they wouldn't tell me the price through email :p

One of our "partners" moved from Vignette to EPiServer, which is how I found out about it.

I'll see if I can get a demo or something and try it out :)

I've gotta admit though, the ease of use for Sitefinity is awesome! Can make complex layouts with simple drag and drop, which is great for the content editors.
 
oh my... umbraco is soooo fast even running on an old box in my house... incredible!

wow, okay... umbraco is sooo powerful.. I'm liking this :D
 
Last edited:
Safe to say Umbraco has blown every other CMS i've ever used right out the water.... From a development point of view, it is fantastic.... their forums also fantastic... and the way I can create the back-end for content editors to use with ease is quite amazing!

I might check out V5, and if it's any better, i'll be amazed :p

I'll check out the perch videos to see what it's all about... I think most CMS's are going to struggle to keep up with Umbraco though from what I've seen. - Now just need to convince the boss this is what we need :)
 
Stretch said:
I've worked with sitecore for a couple of years. I find it to be terrible in some respects.

It requires a huge investment to get up and running (every feature is the same), it's very fragile in many respects, there's no "item/template" source control integration out of the box, upgrades are a headache, it works poorly in enterprise environment (web farms etc), the UI and public site are integrated, it's bloated, it's slow when you have a large installation or they screw up an upgrade, the package system is a joke, publishing is slow and painfully unreliable, support is patchy.....

Imo, it does't even come close to justifying the price tag. It's a good idea, implemented very poorly.
Click to expand...

That's useful to know. They seem desperate to show me a demo (of them using it) and not letting me download a trial and using for myself... so this information will be taken in to account.

As of now, I wouldn't be disappointed in either Sitefinity or Umbraco - which are also both the cheapest (with support)... go figure... :p
 
Stretch said:
Tbh, it takes a few month of using to realise the full extent of the pain.



Almost everything in sitecore requires custom coding. One of the biggest problems we found was it wasn't possible for development to keep up with peoples expectations of what it could deliver. The content editors and sponsors just required flexibility beyond what sitecore was realistically capable of.

Sitecore is fundamentally just a content repository used to store/edit data which is manually bound to what they call "renderings". Renderings are just XSLT or .NET User Controls (ascx). It offers very little functionality out of the box. If you want a "wysiwyg" interface for content editing this is another significant additional development task to build that support into your renderings. Couple this with the problems mentioned in my previous post and the process can be sluggish. If you have a very well defined set of requirements and the time to implement them properly, with out the requirements changing in the mean time, and the site with remain stable for sometime after completion the effort might be worth it. Otherwise I wouldn't bother. We did get a reasonable solution in the end but it required scrapping 18 months work and taking a radically different approach to how sitecore is traditionally used and we still have regular problems.
Click to expand...

I think i'll give it a miss then. Thanks for the heads-up.

I'm also going to be looking for an internal social media site (e.g, an internal facebook). I'm not sure if I would like that on the same system/CMS or to use a dedicated CMS script.

Any ideas for this?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom