On 16 March 2010 14:40, Grant Maw <[email protected]> wrote: > Wondering if anyone has used Telerik's Sitefinity product before, and if > so, what are your thoughts on it as opposed to the other .net CMSs > (DotNetNuke in particular). How do you rate it in terms of the learning > curve from a developer perspective, ease of deployment of apps, source > control issues (if any) etc > > Any and all comments appreciated >
I've not used Sitefinity (looks pretty simplistic from the screenies) but as far as my wide and varied search has gone over the years, there are no good content management solutions for .NET. If you're after something that doesn't pump out some debacle based on web.forms with multiple URLs for the same piece of content, etc then you're fresh out of luck. We have always ended up doing bespoke solutions for customers - at least that way we can ensure we're generating content that is not clogged up with viewstate/__dopostback/entire-page-wrapped-in-<form>-tags and other web.forms junk. We did an eval of DNN as a basis for making ozdotnet a web based forum (using ActiveForums + the mail connector) and found it particularly irritating in terms of the final content rendered and the general pain of using the content management application. You end up spending so much time fighting their crappy framework that you start to think you might just be better writing it all yourself. It is also heavy on the data tier so, like most open source amateur night endeavours, a caching strategy (and associated pain for highly dynamic sites) is mandatory, not optional. There was a whole bunch of stuff in DNN screwed at the time like the scheduler not working - and the developers did not appear to give a rats about fixing the issues (only to give you the normal useless nerd tech support answer of a lecture about not using a web based scheduler but writing a service instead - which is good advice except if you're trying to make a COTS package like ActiveForums work and it is built around the web based scheduler) The best thing we've come across is KenticoCMS however it has a lot of odd behaviours (multiple URLs for the same piece of content, www.codify.com/lists is not the same as www.codify.com/lists/, confusion between folders and pages, scalability issues and so on). The content management application experience is still less than ideal (you really need to know HTML to get the result you want online) and you end up writing everything in MS Word and then converting it to ASCII then marking it up again in HTML inside the CMS. Their HTML rich editor will defeat your every attempt at getting a consistent result on the page. Simple tasks like rearranging ten pages is very difficult due to tree views refreshing on every operation and so on. Plus it is not cheap if you want to host multiple sites. But it is the best of a bad bunch in my view and lets you get the fundamentals around content tagging/meta data right. What are you specifically trying to achieve? That might guide the advice the list gives you. -- David Connors ([email protected]) Software Engineer Codify Pty Ltd - www.codify.com Phone: +61 (7) 3210 6268 | Facsimile: +61 (7) 3210 6269 | Mobile: +61 417 189 363 V-Card: https://www.codify.com/cards/davidconnors Address Info: https://www.codify.com/contact
