I'm looking more towards CMS's as I'd like my clients to be able to be as self sufficient as possible. Anyhow, I'm just starting to evaluate and will update this with my conclusions. However, since I'm starting with evaluating Umbraco first, I'd like to get a consensus.
I have no preference for C# or Vb.Net. so I'm open to either.
Umbraco CMS is a very flexible CMS. The core code of the product is written in C# but really you should never have to read into the source of Umbraco as its so eay to extend.
You can use .NET masterpages in V4 of Umbraco along with .NET usercontrols written in VB or C# which ever you prefer.
I recommend you take a look and let me know what you think.
Here are some links to get you started.
I and my company have just spent the last month or so evaluating Umbraco to see wehther it would fit our needs.
We were looking for an open source replacement to a basic in house CMS we had developed.
It was important that the CMS was in .NET and was easy for end users and developers to use. It also needed to be customisable and extendable.
Umbraco ticked all these boxes and has an active and helpful community surrounding it.
However the documentation is not terribly complete or up to date which can make getting started rather difficult. particularly for more complex implementations.
Another weak area, is workflow and page locking, but this is being worked on in the commercial version and is really only a concern for larger scale implementations.
For getting to grips with simple sites The Creative Website Starter kit is excellent and gives you a good grounding in how Umbraco works and how to implement a simple CMS based website.
The most important thing to do before starting an Umbraco implementation is to plan your document types and content types. This is because once implemented it can be hard to change document types on pages you have already created and populated. CMS projects invariably live and die in the planning phase anyway so this is no different to any other CMS.
I've used many many different CMS platforms over the years: Immediacy, MCMS, Sitecore, Obtree, Reef, Reddot etc etc and I've found Umbraco to be stable, fast and extensible.
It has it's quirks and in some places lacks polish but overall it is an excellent CMS for small to medium sites and, with a bit of tweaking, for large site's as well.
We The Cogworks have settled on Umbraco and are now in the process of migrating our clients, on our legacy platform, to Umbraco as well as a brand new implementation.
Been developing with Umbraco since version 2, and it only goes from strength to strength. Master pages, great templating engine (once you get used to XSLT) and easy to use UI are its really strong points...
I'm just getting up to speed on Umbraco after using Sitecore and Sitefinity on a few projects. I like it a lot and I like how much of the basic work can be done by the front-end developers, thus freeing up .NET developer time to do the hard stuff.
Umbraco.tv has been huge in getting me up to speed quickly.
So far I love the extensibility, simplicity, and control that Umbraco gives to web site builders.
I've built 3 professional sites using umbraco so far (version 4), and I'm very happy with it. Best thing about it is extensiblity.. and its free! any good developer will learn it in no time and once you know how it works, the sky is the limit. I worked with XSLT before so switching to umbraco was easier for me.
I was afraid at first about its XML usage with large scale sites, but I've seen huge sites with 10K+ pages and user controls running on umbraco 2, so all fears are now gone.
lack of documentation may be a problem sometimes, but you can usually google answers for any situation that arrise.
bottom line: a big yay!
The answer is... Probably yes but it depends.
We had a good look at it and found that while it's very good, if you have simple or very specific requirements with users who want detailed control over them, you might be better off rolling your own.
While it's solid and well supported we felt that the learning curve was still steep enough that we'd make a reasonable investment only to end up with something which was more of a compromise than we wanted.
A sister company in the group went through a similar exercise and came to the same conclusion. Both companies were in the travel industry and the sites we were building needed quite specific structures, used specific data sources and so on and getting Umbraco to work in the way we wanted would have been as much work as starting from scratch using .NET MVC and retaining complete control.
In short, if you want a CMS, have a look but have a good look at your requirements before you conclude that you're not better off building something yourself.
(Note: I'm not saying roll your own is always the best way forward, but it can offer genuine benefits which can be worth the effort).