What alternatives are there in OS projects for c# similar to Joomla/Mambo/Drupal?

Question

I'm beginning a project with a client to build a web application and I'm a little stuck on which solution to go with.

I've used Joomla for many clients in the past, but this client has specific requests that I KNOW I'm going to have to build myself.

The problem I'm facing is that I work full time under the .NET spectrum and while I am a novice developer in PHP, and I've been studying Joomla's plug in architecture for about a month now, I am a lot more comfortable building something in ASP.NET than I am in PHP.

My question is, what OS projects are out there that have a similar community following as Joomla/Mambo/Drupal, along with a plug in architecture that is somewhat akin to Joomla as well?

I don't really have the time to build out a full blown CMS system in ASP.NET, but if something already exists that can give me X% (25%, 50%, something) of what Joomla has that will at least get me on the right path. Joomla just has too many extensions and too much of a community backing for me to pass it up if there's not something comparable in the ASP.NET realm.

Answer 1

I've use (and struggled with) DotNetNuke.

Answer 2

There's also Umbraco that I've heard good things about :)

Answer 3

There's mojoPortal.

It seems it's not as "big" as DotNetNuke (for example), but it has quite a lot of features:

• Blogs, Forums, Event Calendar, Google Maps, Photo Galleries, e-commerce, Secure File Sharing, Newsletter, Surveys, Polls,

Answer 4

Telerik has a community edition of their SiteFinity CMS system. While I've had great experience with RadControls, I can't vouch for SiteFinity. It may be worth checking out though, as Telerik has great support for their products.

This maybe an even bigger stretch, but Rob Connery's (the SubSonic guy) MVC StoreFront has good CMS / content publishing capability that has a plugin architeture. He has published a series of screencasts that revolve around its capability. Rob gave a preview of the capability at MIX.

Answer 5

N2 looks quite nice, I haven't been using it though: http://n2cms.com/

Answer 6

Umbraco is excellent. It uses a simular node structure to drupal and very easy to extend thru custom user controls or XSLT. Also i've found that my client who are not the most computer literate people have found the umbraco interface easy to use.

Answer 7

Check out Cuyahoga

Answer 8

Might be worth taking a look at Graffiti

Whilst it's not open source, it is .NET based and has a simple theme engine and plugin architecture. It doesn't have as huge a following as the likes of Drupal, but it's fairly simple to set up and fits your current skillset when it comes to extending it.

Update: Graffiti is now open source.

Answer 9

in addition to N2, mentioned above (of which i am a big fan), there's an option (for really brave souls!) to run Drupal on top of .Net with Phalanger compiler -- it requires several patches to Phalanger and at least one fix to Drupal itself (session cookie handling stuff, to be precise). As a reward, you'll get a performance bust plus all the goodies of .Net development tools.