Community Site with Blogs and forums - Oxite, DNN or CS?

Question

Hi all,

I need to do a community site with blogs and forums, and was looking at 3 options: Oxite, DNN and community server. The frontend will be a mixture of ASP.NET and Silverlight. LiveID integration would be a plus. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Oxite is quite new, and as far as I know doesn't support forums, so out of the box it's not going to do what you need. There are other, more mature blog engines in .Net listed on the oxite home page

When you say "the front end will be a mixture of ASP.NET and Silverlight" you seem to be indicating that you're going to be writing your own front end and want a starting point? How much of your own coding are you wanting to do?

But Oxite is open source, and is now getting towards the point where it can serve as a sample of best practices in ASP.NET MVC, i.e. cutting-edge stuff that other blog projects probably won't have. if it has benefit for you, that will be it.

Community server looks a lot more complete, but I have no experience on how usable it is. It's not clear if this is open-source or not, but it looks like you will need to pay for the larger editions. Are you willing to do this?

DNN means DotNetNuke? It's free like Oxite, and full-featured like Community server. I don't know much more about it.

Answer 2

I'd recommend DNN ( DotNetNuke ). It's has most features you could imagine, including LiveId and a few other login providers. The most compelling argument for DNN is the 3rd party community built around the platform. You can find almost anything you'd be looking for. Check out SnowCovered for a few of the available modules.

There is a MS Excel spreadsheet comparing several of the popular CMS's you might want to check out here CMS Comparison Grid