What CMS should I learn? .Net ones only

Question

Hi

I am thinking of learning a CMS. I am not sure which one will be the best to learn.

I seen quite a few job posting asking for a website with CMS capabilities(so it seems something that would be good to know).

CMS on the surface seem to be easy to use but in my mind this seems to quickly change when I start thinking of sites that need more then just out of the box functionality.

For instance sites that need custom themes. How do you switch out themes with your own layouts? Or what happens if a page on your website needs to have custom logic and cms editing on the same page.

Like say you need to write something that pulls up data from a db and format it on the page but to the right of this data you have a paragraph that an admin should be able to edit through the CMS.

So how do you have this work? How do you add say the gridview server control to this page?

So I guess what I am getting up I looking for a CMS that has good documentation on how to do custom logic on pages and not just a CMS where if your not using there own themes and try to add your custom logic on a page you basically have go through the CMS and change the entire source code.

I like using asp.net mvc but as far as I can really see there is really only one CMS that is built on MVC and that is Orchard but it's still in beta and always changing. So I don't want to invest time to learn on how how to use it and then they make changes and your back to square one.

Thanks

Answer 1

My friend used .Net Nuke to create a CMS.
http://www.dotnetnuke.com/

It was his final project in school and they still use it.
http://www.garneau-tennis.com/

The obvious advantage is that you can develop in .Net.

Check it out if nothing else.

Answer 2

It seems like you have 2 competing concerns: 1) which CMS might be best to learn for "professional" opportunities, and 2) which CMS might be best to learn for staying with relevant/interesting technologies like MVC.

For the first concern, a lot of that depends on how long a particular CMS has been around. For example, DotNetNuke has been around for many year, is well-established, and many use it to build commercial CMS solutions. It is web forms based. There are many other well-established CMS out there. For example, the Web Platform Installer from Microsoft, gives options to install WordPress.

For the second concern, I would recommend Orchard. Yes, it is in beta but it has been in development for a while now and is really getting better stability. Even if there are changes from here, I'd expect them to be minor and not sweeping changes to force to you learn a brand new paradigm. As you pointed out, it is also MVC-based. This let's you do development in a much more friendly way - and without having to jump through a bunch of hoops.

Answer 3

N2 CMS would seem to fit all your requirements:

http://n2cms.com/

http://n2cms.codeplex.com/

I've created two CMS sites recently using this. It is probably the best developed CMS around although there is a learning curve. It also has an ASP.NET MVC version :-)

Several themes come with it out of the box. I have already built two custom themes myself and it was pretty painless.

Answer 4

Dot Net Nuke - Well established and using the MVP pattern to ease WebForms development / testing.

Umbraco - Another well known (ran on asp.net) and they are working on an MVC version.

Orchard - New, very new but all MVC. I think this will be a winner as it matures. It's not necessarily bad to get in early. Even as things change you will be able to pick them up and when Orchard hits the prime time you will already know it while all the others waited for it to get out of beta. :-)