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asp.net mvc cms list

It looks like ASP.NET MVC is gaining a great momentum which could bring more exposure to my free ASP.NET MVC CMS. I have been keeping an eye on the competition ASP.NET CMS to see if there is anything out there that is going the same direction as my product, and here is a list of the current landscape with some comments how I think these products compare to what I am trying to accomplish.

Again, let me restate my goal: I wan to have a small light yet powerful CMS using the latest ASP.NET technology that would be a great ASP.NET alternative to Wordpress.

Here is the list and my comments about each products:

  • Kentico CMS for ASP.NET
    very complex, not really free, and in ASP.NET MVC, so from my perspective using outdated technology
  • Telerik Sitefinity
    big fancy product in the spirit of Telerik, not free, not MVC, not simple
  • DotNetNuke
    the good news: it's free and open source, otherwise an overkill for a blog site
  • mojoPortal
    looks outdated and complicated
  • Oxite
    the other side of the spectrum: very complex and not free
  • N2 Open Source ASP.NET CMS
    the sample page looks like a spam site, so I guess the developer decided just to make some adsence money of his code
  • BlogEngine.NET
    looks OK but since it's not in MVC I would call it an outdated technology...
  • umbraco
    this is definitely a mature product, however would be a total overkill for a small website, and is not free either. This is the other side of the spectrum that my CMS is trying to target: simple websites, and blogs.
  • mvccms.com
    does not look like a finished product, more like a sandbox code
  • Graffiti CMS
    this one is probably to closest to what I am trying to do, has the simplicity, and decent UI, however does not run on ASP.NET MVC so I would call it outdated.

Comments:

Polemus
9/1/2010 3:38 PM
you can also have a look at: http://cmsmvc.codeplex.com/ which is a CMS built using asp.net mvc with plugin and theme support

dave
9/3/2010 5:20 AM
@Polemus: looks like it's in an early stage... don't have VS 2010 installed yet, so was not able to take a look but I will make sure I check on your project from time to time :)

Mike E
10/4/2010 8:22 PM
Hey Dave, You might remember me from Dave Gelinas's Party, I still work at eLearners.com. I have looked into all the CMS's you have and pretty much came up with the same results. Here is my latest graffiti site: http://www.elearners.com/guide/. I loved graffiti but it hit a dead end when it went open source. As you said it would also be nice if you could integrate it with MVC.NET. I have been getting into MVC and we have actually chosen to use N2 as our new code base. The problems we are having with N2 are the limitations of it's 4 table DB and its overall incompleteness. At first it looked like a pass until I discoved this thread: http://n2cms.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=76086 (pretty awesome site). This is another pretty large site using N2: http://www.techeye.net/. We are now hoping that once we get this thing going and we dicect it a bit that we will only have some of N2's core features and upgrade it to something like Drupal CMS. Below is my wishlist for a .NET CMS: -Taxonomy (Like Drupal's no just a menu folder structure) -Unlimited URL aliasing and ability to administer any pattern you want from the admin (Like Drupal's) -Breadcrumbs and navigations that are completely customizable. -Real Theming, this means you have the ability to select different themes not just the CSS files (that is lame), graffiti did a good job with this. -Updated Rich text editors such as Ckeditor. -An admin nice and clean like Graffiti's. -Content types you can administer in the Admin and a scalable database. -Solr search built in. -Obvious things like the ability to easily extend. -Totally MVC.NET and absolutely no Web Forms!!! Let me know if you feel the same.

mathieu kempe
10/6/2010 11:02 AM
Did you look at Orchard http://www.orchardproject.net/?