Experiences with Ektron?

Question

Hi,

For those of you who have used Ektron, what were your experiences like?

How was the API? Easy to customize?

Anything stand out good/bad with the product?

Answer 1

Documentation is terrible and non-existent. APIs are poorly implemented, spotty and very difficult to use. CMS user interface is a kludge.

The feature set is rich and powerful on the surface, but riddled with dead ends and blind alleys that although you 'can' do what you dream about, plan on it taking 10 times longer than it should while you search for non-existent documentation, code work-around code for missing or strangely implemented API calls.

Answer 2

Strictly as a CMS I give it a 7 out of 10.

Pros: - API is flexible and comprehensive - Contains workflows for content approval

Cons: - WYSIWYG editor can clash with your front end markup. (content editors may need to know html) - Licensing is expensive and the software is tied to the CPU. Relicensing cost when moving to another machine is expensive.

Answer 3

Not much experience with the CMS solution, but we've used their WYSIWYG on and off for years. I don't think it's much more terrible than most other such components, except that:

1. It's pretty heavy-weight. The CABs are a few megabytes, if memory serves.
2. It's an ActiveX control. There is now a shim that they ship that will allow Firefox to host the control, but even then, it's Windows-only.

On a corporate intranet, neither of those is probably a big deal. But a lighter-weight, more standard editor like TinyMCE or FCKeditor might be better in those cases.

Answer 4

Ektron is pretty buggy, and they don't seem to issue bugfixes or patches (they do apparently issue security patches, but in nearly a year, I've only seen one of these, which is kind of worrying in itself). This means that if some functionality you really need is being blocked by one of these bugs, your options are to attempt a workaround or wait until a new release of the whole CMS400.NET package, which you must then install. The problem with this is that new versions typically come with various API changes or other undocumented changes in (minor) functionality. For that reason, I would say it's not very enterprise friendly.

Also, what everyone else said.

Answer 5

First of all, let me clarify that I'm not a .NET developer, so I couldn't tell you anything about how easy/difficult Ektron is to set up, or the APIs, or stuff like that... though I've heard plenty of Devs around the office cussing up a storm when the subject is brought up.

As a front-end developer, Ektron doesn't give me the freedom that I want with a CMS. It's very slow, and overly AJAXified, and the editor is worse than any other Web-based WYSIWYG editor I've used. The editor always tries to reformat your code, and you often end up on the losing side of the battle. My co-workers and I have found a number of workarounds, such as putting extra <div>s in places where they're not needed, just so Ektron won't strip out the entire block of code. Also, if you ever put any CSS or JavaScript in an Ektron content block, hope that you don't have to edit it, because all whitespace will be removed, making it very hard to scan through. Also, Ektron's editor has it's own idea of what is considered valid code... and will tell you what is "wrong" with your code EVERY time you publish a change. For example, it wants you to put a title="" attribute on every link, and won't let you publish until you close the alert window saying that you know and you're fine with that.

Just my $0.02.

Answer 6

I f--king hate it. i use it on a daily basis as both a designer and content manager, and it is one of the biggest pieces of sh*t I have ever worked with. Ease of use? I have to train people in HTML and Ektron for them to even use this... doesn't that defeat the purpose of a CMS? The end users don't and/or can't work with it. Words are not enough, I wrote a letter to Ektron, all it said was "Dear Ektron" then it looks like somebody just spit on the page. I hate you Ektron.

Of course the Ektron site we use was developed by half-assed tards who themselves didn't understand it and the frame hasn't been touched since... going on 4 years of no improvements b/c nobody knows how to develop for it. jeezus.

Answer 7

The only available single-sign-on solution is Active Directory.

Edit: this seems to have changed.

Answer 8

It's a pretty terrible user experience. I hope you know XSLT, because that's the way it is designed to work. There is the Ektron way, and the highway. It imposes a particular style of development, and any other path leads to a world of pain. And even if you do use XSLT, it's still very clunky and buggy.

Answer 9

A really, really bad product. Use something else.

Answer 10

Ektron is a highly expensive product that more or less expects you to use nothing but XSL to customize it. They are reversing an API into it which is semi functional but has almost 0 effort put into the architecture so it is a complete chore to accomplish anything.

If its my money I'd purchase EPiServer over ektron any day of the week. Give it a look, its well worth your time.

http://www.episerver.com/

(I am in no way affiliated with either company)

Answer 11

Here's a couple of different perspectives.

Content Editors - Dislike the editing interface, and frankly I feel sorry for them. Ektron does not to any usability testing, so it's going to take a lot of getting used to, especially for the non-technical types. On an almost daily basis, the content editors find some quirk in the editing interface. I constantly have to tell users to switch to Firefox from IE8, or back to IE8 from FF when they are having problems, because there's a lot of cross browser issues. The Wysiwyg editor is pretty poor IMO. That and the HTML their server controls generate is really bad and difficult, and in some cases impossible to style without using Javascript.

Developers - Unless you want the exact functionality of one of their starter sites, you're job is going to be difficult. Their documentation is severely lacking and their APIs are filled with code smells, which make them extremely difficult to work with. Their support service is very hit or miss, I talk with them a lot to try to gain more knowledge of how their APIs work and what the appropriate parameters are (which is next to impossible to know when the parameter is object or a VB Collection instead of an actual data type). I typically go weeks without a response from support, which ranges from completely wrong info, to helpful info, to code from their starter sites which is unrelated.

Answer 12

It is absolutely terrible in every sense of the word. I used it for 3 years as the webmaster of my last job. I did some custom programming (terribly difficult), every time I saw xsl I wanted to scream (everything uses xsl in this system), and end users hated the crappy user interface.

I opened my own web development shop and have had great luck with Telerik's Sitefinity. Very flexible and easy to use, easy to develop against, and version 4, which is due out this year, is an absolute dream. At under 1K a website it is a no brainer. It is going to kill Ektron's market share once people wake up and smell the coffee.