CMS for a personal website - ASP.NET/C#

Question

I plan to create a community website aimed at publishing ASP.NET articles, blogs, forums and video tutorials.

I am considering DNN and MojoPortal. Some of my requirements are:

1. An editor that lets me post code with ease
2. Open source preferably written in C#
3. Easy to export content if there is a need to switch CMS
4. Some way of easily posting video articles

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Also, in the US, what hosting company would you recommend to host this site? Hopefully, it won't cost me a fortune to maintain it. Should I consider DotNetNuke as some hosting providers have DNN installed by default?

Thanks!

Answer 1

1. Content Management - ASP.NET Recommendations
2. What is the best open source .Net content management system (cms)?

Answer 2

I recommend N2.

It's opensource, free, written in C#, has plug-in support and is very extensible on every level.

Answer 3

Disclaimer: the next few sentences are 100% personal opinion, but I want to offer it unfiltered to help communicate how strongly I feel it. Also, my opinions are based entirely on the state of the product as of late 2007. If it has undergone a fundamental architectural redesign since then, this may not be valid:

DotNetNuke is the absolute worst ASP.NET-based product to ever hit the big time. I don't understand why it's so popular and I hate it, and I could write pages and pages describing why, but I won't here because DNN is so well-known that people fall into two camps:

1) You already secretly agree with me but are too nice to say it out loud, or you suspected it was true but needed some confirmation.

2) You love DNN and we will never agree on this, regardless of how well-written our reasons are (not that mine would necessarily be as well-written as yours).

Both are equally valid so there's no reason to argue, we can all just go our separate ways and be happy. But if you do fall into camp #1, now know that you're not alone :)

That having been said, Graffiti, Umbraco and N2 are small-scale CMS products that I do like. Graffiti is good for especially small sites that incorporate a blog-like IA. Umbraco and N2 seem to work for hierarchical sites that are a little larger in scale.

As far as hosting, the best experience I've had so far for ASP.NET shared hosting is Crystal Tech.

Answer 4

For community sites and using .NET I think the best is Community Server Express Edition, by Telligent. This product is free.

There are several paid versions also if your site grows and you need some administrative advanced options.

You can find it here: http://communityserver.com/products/express/

From their home page:

Telligent Community Server is the proven enterprise community software solution for creating online communities. Thousands of customers, (to include Dell, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Intel, and MySpace.com), rely on Community Server to solve their Digital Marketing and Enterprise 2.0 collaboration needs.

http://communityserver.com

Edit: I have used DNN in the past and find it very time consuming and very slow.

Answer 5

Haven't use it, but Cuyahoga will be my next CMS.

I'm currently using Graffiti CMS and really like it, but would prefer to use something that's open source.

Answer 6

If you are evaluating DotNetNuke, take a look at version 4.9.2. Install it and start playing around with it yourself and form your own opinion. It is very important to consider other's opinions, but in the end you need to decide for yourself, and preferably you reach a decision after actually evaluating the product on your own.

If you're curious what others have actually implemented with DotNetNuke, check out dnnGallery.

I plan to create a community website aimed at publishing ASP.NET articles, blogs, forums and video tutorials.

There are several article management solutions for DotNetNuke that you can investigate further. Two I have had experience using are Ventrian's New's Articles and Engage: Publish. There is a core blog module and a core forum module as well (core meaning that it ships with DotNetNuke). There are also third party solutions such as Active Forums and often people use the article management modules mentioned above as blogs.

An editor that lets me post code with ease

DotNetNuke uses the provider model for most everything, and the rich text editor is no exception. I believe Telerik has a rich text editor that you can plug in, but DotNetNuke 4.9.2 ships with the FCK Editor 2.6.3.

Open source preferably written in C#

DotNetNuke is open source and has a very liberal license that allows you to do most anything with the code. The "core" is written in VB.NET but frequently extensions (even some of the core extensions) are developed using C#.

Easy to export content if there is a need to switch CMS

While this isn't the only way to export data from a DotNetNuke site, DotNetNuke has a templating system that allows you to export at the portal, page, and module level. If you export data at the portal level you get a lot of information (site information, site settings, page structure, page settings, module information, module content, etc...). This could be used to import that information into another system, but would require you as a developer to parse the XML that was exported and store that in your new application.

Also, in the US, what hosting company would you recommend to host this site? Hopefully, it won't cost me a fortune to maintain it. Should I consider DotNetNuke as some hosting providers have DNN installed by default?

Here are some links for more information on DotNetNuke hosting.

• Good DotNetNuke Hosting Providers (Chris Hammond)
• Finding a DotNetNuke Host (Chris Hammond)
• DotNetNuke Hosting Revisited (Mitchel Sellers)

Answer 7

I love WordPress even though I code in ASP.NET at work all the time. Now since I work in .NET, I looked around at .NET blogging tools that were open source and as complete as WordPress. I haven't found any yet. So... I decided to use blogger.com and integrate into an ASP.NET site. The cool thing about this is you can have a regular ASP.NET site and add a blog to it and use the same master page(s). Here's my article explaining how I did this, http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/integrate_Blogger.aspx . Now I know this means you're relying on blogger.com, but I don't see Google going under any time soon.

Hope that helps, Nick

Answer 8

Have you taken a look at Sitefinity?

As a developer you probably need a framework to step on, not merely a CMS. You mention it yourself - posting code, exporting, these kinds of things that an end-user wouldn't care about much.

Sitefinity provides this framework. It is very extensible, includes a lot of built-in modules (Blogs, News, Forums, Images & Documents...), and has an extensive API that you can use to plug into any part of the system. It all depends on how much functionality you want out of the box and how flexible you want to be. I think you'll find a good balance in this product.

Also, it uses a lot of the ideas from ASP.NET itself and builds on them (e.g. masterpages). This reduces the time it takes to learn it a lot.

There's a free community edition available, too. Check it out.

Answer 9

Here's two providers that are decent

• DailyRazor - you get free SQL Server databases, and domains.
• DiscountASP - SQL Server 2005/2008 is $10 a month extra, includes some good tools for backingup and restoring

And for the CMS:

• N2 CMS
  • Importing/Exporting: done via XML files
  • Video content: You could write a new Part to do this easily. A part is just a class with properties that you can drop on the page in predefined places ("zones")
  • Code friendly editor: has WMD and markdown support (WMD is the editor Stackoverflow uses)
  • Open source, written in C#.

But as a contributor I'm biased.

Answer 10

Hi i spend a lot of time developing on dotnetnuke. It is very slow in big projects I recommend y N2. It is faster and easier