hello, I am getting a large website developed. The develop has asked me which do I prefer either sitefinity or umbraco. The site will be similar to wikipedia where users can come and edit pages without having to login. I would like to ask your opionions on these two csm systems and which one would you recommend for content website with a community feel and wiki features. Thanks
+3
A:
If it's a non-commercial (charity?) site, you may be able to obtain the community version of Sitefinity for free if you display their logo in the footer. Sitefinity has a lot to offer, including an ORM.
Umbraco on the other hand has, for me personally, an unhealthy reliance on XSLT to customize the content. That was the main reason I didn't go with it.
I would go for Sitefinity or N2 for this.
IrishChieftain
2010-10-19 03:21:23
You don't have to use any XSLT in Umbraco if you don't want to, though it is very handy as a way to seperate out the presentation of your site.
sebastiaan
2010-10-19 06:45:57
@Sebastian, that's interesting; I must check it out again. The ASPNET site is Umbraco I believe? Can we use SQL Server with it? +1 :-)
IrishChieftain
2010-10-19 13:55:57
Yes, the asp.net site uses it and wired.co.uk as well (and other big sites). Instead of XSLT you could always use .net user controls. SQL Server would be the best choice, Umbraco also works with MySQL and recently SQL Server CE.
sebastiaan
2010-10-19 20:06:49
They're charging 3,000 euros for support...
IrishChieftain
2010-10-19 20:35:10
As far as I am aware, Sitefinity Community Edition has no restrictions on being commercial.
awrigley
2010-10-20 19:24:50
+1
A:
If you're looking for a CMS for a large website and with wiki features, look at Kentico CMS. It was designed for large number of documents and it's the most advanced .NET CMS I have seen.
It has a built-in user-contribution module that allows public users to create new content items from the live site and you can control who can do that (all/authenticated/selected roles) and what type of content items (news/pages/knowledge base articles) they can create. Kentico has a free version, but for this type of functionality, you would need a paid license. Still, if it meets your needs for user contributed content, it may pay for itself very quickly since AFAIK no other .NET CMS has this built-in.
David Kochenski
2010-10-20 04:26:09
I haven't used Umbraco or Sitefinity... yet, but I have been impressed by Kentico. I have used Ektron CMS400.net and DotNetNuke, and wouldn't recommend them to my worst enemy... if that helps.
JasonS
2010-10-20 04:32:20
A:
I disagree with @IrishChieftain's answer and would most certainly go with Umbraco!
I've built a number of websites in Umbraco (and have got my certification) and I have to say I absolutely love it!
XSLT is very easy to learn unless you come across some really complex functionality. But even then, you can resort to ASP.NET if you don't want to learn XSLT.
Marko
2010-10-20 04:31:45
Hi Marko, I work every day with a huge ASPNET site that uses XML/XSLT. But, given a choice I would opt for CSS to control my display and apply it to user controls if possible :-)
IrishChieftain
2010-10-20 19:33:40
A:
Umbraco was possibly the worst CMS a few years back when it was in version 2. Things have changed though and, for me, it jumped to the top of the list when it hit version 4. I find Umbraco to be the easiest CMS to manage and develop in. The XSLT is probably the hardest thing to get used to here, but like others mentioned it isn't a show stopper because you can still do everything using Umbraco data access layer. The one thing i absolutely love about it is how easy it is for the end user. The UI is very intuitive and easy to grasp. The only downside i see with Umbraco is bugs and there are a whole lot of them even in version 4 releases. Most of them are UI bugs. However, some do affect advanced features such as packages. I would still go with Umbraco if i had to pick a choose a CMS for a project of any size.
Sergey
2010-10-20 04:43:30
A:
Contrary to what others have suggested, I find the use of XSLT in Umbraco advantageous on numerous levels. In particular the time it takes to make changes and see their results is very quick. Just create transform and put a macro in your page and you can see the results. You get access to all the site data as necessary directly in the transform. Also, the fact that you are just working in HTML within the XSL transform means that it would be easy for a non .NET web developer to make changes too. I've found that although this is a .NET based CMS there is little reason to perform anything in code so you only really have to have open the CMS and your favourite text editor (I'd suggest using a text editor and accessing static files this way (through FTP or whatever if you're not logged in to the machine the CMS is on) rather than through the CMS interface.
Chris A
2010-10-26 12:49:36