Grant,

There's plenty of CMS' to choose from here..
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/products/

I've had a look at Umbraco, DNN and SiteFinity..
They're all pretty good, although DNN doesn't appear to target the same
audience as Umbraco and SiteFinity.

Grant



On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 8:08 PM, Grant Maw <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hey David
>
> Thanks for the detailed response.
>
> We have to use a .net solution because the client is heavily invested in
> .net already and we want to re-use as much as we can in terms of existing
> skills and existing code. We are already working with DNN but Sitefinity
> came onto our radar and I was just curious as to what people's experiences
> were. We'll probably grab the free copy and evaluate it, as well as the one
> you mention below.
>
> Cheers
>
> Grant
>
> On 16 March 2010 15:10, David Connors <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>  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
>>
>>
>

Reply via email to