Best CMS to use on Windows Azure

Question

Hi Guys,

I've just started a new software consultancy business and I'm currently putting together designs for my website. We will be at a stage very soon to start converting these into a template for a CMS.

I have used http://n2cms.com before, but my designer has built many sites using WordPress, we recently built a site which worked very well and I was very impressed by the WordPress admin.

So I might be a bit risque and build my site in WordPress, host on Azure, even though my consultancy specialises in Azure & Silverlight :)

What's your thoughts? Can you suggest any other great .NET CMS's that would sway me away from WordPress?

Any suggestions much appreciated.

Cheers, Ash.

P.S. Anything that uses Table Storage would be cool, and would be much cheaper!

Answer 1

The Orchard Project seems to have much potential if you want to be risque and still stick on the .NET application programming platform stack. From the website:

"Orchard is a free, open source, community-focused project aimed at delivering applications and reusable components on the ASP.NET platform. It will create shared components for building ASP.NET applications and extensions, and specific applications that leverage these components to meet the needs of end-users, scripters, and developers. In the near term, the Orchard project is focused on delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an extensibility framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through modules and themes.

Answer 2

Truly supporting Azure means tackling the cloud storage challenge. As you mention, this means using native Azure storage (table, queue, blob) to persist data. To my knowledge, there isn't any CMS that has truly addressed Azure storage.

It's easy for a CMS to claim Azure support by using SQL Azure. This isn't true Azure support though. SQL Azure databases get capped at 50GB...which means they aren't infinitely scalable. Any solution that is using SQL Azure isn't infinitely scalable.

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All this being said, I work for Telerik and we have an ASP.NET based CMS called Sitefinity. Version 4.0 of Sitefinity is coming soon and it runs using Azure & SQL Azure. If your database will never exceed 50GB, then this might work for you.

We've discussed creating support for native Azure storage in future versions of Sitefinity. However, I can't give an ETA.

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Ultimately, I agree with others though; if you're happy with Wordpress, then use it.

Answer 3

I agree with Gabe that true Azure support from a CMS means leveraging the cloud's native queue, table and blob storage. I'll also add that a good Azure CMS should work out of the box when deployed on numerous machines sitting behind a load balancer (basically a must if you care about Azure's SLA).

I myself did a research similar to yours a couple of months ago and ended up using N2CMS in an ASP.NET MVC application. AFAIK, there is still no CMS to comply with the above definition of good Azure support, so I would recommend going with N2 if you use ASP.NET MVC. The learning curve is a bit steep, but you mentioned you've used it before so this shouldn't be an issue. However, the great architectural flexibility N2 allows and the fact it's open source were the decisive points in my case.

Regarding Wordpress, there's no arguing about the qualities of this CMS. Anyone who's used it (including myself) should be able to confirm that. However, deploying Wordpress on Azure still feels somewhat "hacky" to me. It will no doubt work, but I personally try to use native solutions and that's the reason I went with a .NET CMS on Azure and I always use Wordpress on Linux servers. I believe that's the right approach if you plan to maintain your application in the long run.

In the end, the choice you have to make is a trade-off between many factors like your in-house know-how, your preferred technologies, etc. If you need rather quick results and have Wordpress guys at the moment - go for Wordpress. If not - I recommend ASP.NET MVC with N2.

Well, at least that's my 2 cents :) Hope this helps.

Answer 4

Ash, There is new free open source CMS called Composite C1. Just couple of weeks ago company released source code to CodePlex (before it's was 100% commercial). C1 provide you full control on layout (XHTML, XSLT) - your designer will love it... also it's build on .NET 4 and using C#, LINQ.. allows create quickly functionality..very flexible...and user friendly.. for example you can edit several pages at same time.. it's uses XML as data storage, so no need for database, but there is commercial module which allows easy move to SQL. Company having workshop today regarding Azure (check Community tab at the website) and looks like will take required actions in this directions (no time frame available).

DISCLAIMER: I work in Composite’s QA group, so this is not an unbiased suggestion ;p but I've moved my personal website to Composite C1 (from Umbraco) and quite happy!