Content Management Systems (CMS) for the .NET Platform

July 16, 2008

Currently we’re in the process of planning a rewrite of our vertical market portal system, delivered as SaaS, in order to bring it out of the stone ages of ASP.NET 1.0 and into to something a bit more modern, mostly so that it doesn’t feel so awkward mixing with our other, more cutting edge applications during customer demos and office integration parties. (We’re sensitive like that).

Anyway, building a portal system from scratch is tempting from a technologists point of view, but a bit silly from a business standpoint as the "portal" has been solved a few trillion times already using every web-capable technology known to man, ASP.NET included.

Choosing a CMS from the perspective of a SaaS vendor looking for a development platform to build a niche product and deliver it using flexible pricing models (including free, at times) is no easy task.

There are three major challenges in this process:

  • Flooded CMS Market: The sheer quantity of CMS systems for sale or for free. True, only a few rise to the top, but it takes a lot of sifting to figure out which ones.
  • Licensing: Not an issue with the open source projects in this review, but for most of the quality commercial products sporting open, powerful extensibility, this is a huge issue, and probably a deal breaker for us at the end of the day because we want the flexibility to throw our application on any number of servers at any time to suit any purpose without throwing fistfuls of money into the furnace each time we do so. This is probably not so much of an issue for shops wanting to build systems for their own companies, or for consultants or integrators building unique systems one at a time for their customers.
  • Technical Fit: This is sort of a two part problem - is the product under review capable of easily being extended to seamlessly integrate with and host our custom applications, authentication mechanisms and Asynchronous Messaging Lifestyle, and is the system documented well enough that it even matters what it is technically capable of.

Anyway, I’ve spend more hours than I care to admit scouring the web for CMS systems that will accelerate our time to market while using modern techniques and technologies (.NET compatible only) and at the same time offers a licensing model that will allow us to operate freely in our own marketplace. While the hammer hasn’t fallen yet in our decision making process, the licensing of models of the top tier commercial options are probably going to be too restrictive. But I’m listing them here anyway because our licensing needs are unique.

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Commercial Products:

Sitecore CMS - very powerful, very polished product. They have a suite of web 2.0 collaboration modules you can buy, a "Foundry" product that allows you to manage large numbers of sites at once, and a nice developer, content designer and end user experience. Their licensing, though, didn’t work for us. They wouldn’t license their intranet / web 2.0 product to us at all because we sell to external customers, and their Foundry product had page limit caps on it. There were no other options, so, unfortunately, not for us.

Ektron CMS - Also a very nice product. The administrative functionality definitely feels a bit old school from a look and feel perspective (especially when compared to the Office 2007 Ribbon interface and "virtual web desktop" features of Sitecore) but the suite of pre-built portal controls can’t be beat. Well thought out, lots of social networking features, easy to integrate, very nice.  The sales experience was head and shoulders above Sitecore. The demo’s were all impressive, they have a blue million fully featured "starter sites" you can download and play with that feature various strengths and uses for the product, and the sales team is highly responsive, and willing to work with our devs to build a prototype during the evaluation process. I like this company a lot - BUT - you need to buy a server license for each URL - and we’ll host dozens of URL’s, many for small low-revenue companies, and so that may not work for us.

Kentico - well priced product, you can set up a sandbox without sales intervention and start playing around, plenty of features for the bullet point-sheet, BUT - it just felt a little awkward and clunky to me. Check it out for yourself, but it wasn’t quite what it needed to be for us to built our product out of it.

Episerver - The website got me all excited - the technology looks GREAT - but good luck buying the thing in the US. They only sell through partners, they only list three US partners on their site, and I couldn’t get a single one of them to call me back. Requests for sales support on their website went unanswered - SO… no thanks. (As if I had a choice).

Sitefinity - from Telerik, a vendor of very nice ASP.NET UI controls (and windows forms controls). Attractive site with workflow built-in, *very* inexpensive, but not in the same league with the other players in terms of functionality or maturity. Probably great for outward facing websites, not enough meat for our portal app.

Two others I didn’t carefully review but that look nice enough:

http://www.adxstudio.com/
http://www.contentxxl.com/Home.aspx

Commercial, but FREE?!

AXCMS - Support driven, like an open source project, but not open source. Odd duck. We haven’t looked at this one yet, just found it yesterday, but it looks promising. I’ll update this post once we’ve dived deeper.

Open Source

There are quite a few mature, open source CMS products for ASP.NET out there. Probably the most famous is DotNetNuke, but there are at least five or six mature competitors and a few nascent but promising projects as well.

DotNetNuke - I don’t have much to say about this project, except that it is hugely popular, but just not for me. The code base is in VB.NET, which isn’t a deal breaker, but not my preference all things being equal. Also the extensibility framework seems to be just a touch messy. My preference is to define controls that are fundamentally independent of a framework and easily wire them in. DotNetNuke likes things a little more intimate last time I checked. But there is a huge selection of pre-built modules to choose from for free, and many for sale, but also many of very low quality, so you have to be careful (although they are almost all very cheap, so the risk isn’t high). I believe DotNetNuke has a service organization, so you can buy professional support, and there are many, many vendors and consultants offering everything from full DNN implementations to skin designs.

Raibow Portal - I didn’t take a very close look at this project, even though it seems reasonably popular and quite deep. Mostly because it too suffers from the million-modules of questionable quality issue, and it isn’t very attractive our up to date feeling out of the box. If I’m evaluating a product and feel like I’m back in 1998, it is hard for me to stay engaged. Probably a personal issue, so don’t let it dissuade you from taking a peek.

Cuyahoga Project - this is a sparse CMS framework meant to be extended, and from what I can see extending it is not hard. It comes with a few basic modules, like a blog and news. The admin UI is clean and relatively un-adorned, and I believe its development takes an ALT.NET bent. We’ll be taking a closer look at this one. Documentation is a bit spar
se and scattered, though, but that is common in the ASP.NET Open Source CMS arena, it seems.

Umbraco - A very nice, relatively mature CMS. It is in beta for a 4.0 version with looks vastly improved, with a renovated plug-in architecture, ASP.NET Provider security, and many other enhanced features. The 4.0 release looks like it will be so much better than the 1.x version, we haven’t dived too deeply into the 1.x version and are seeing if we can hold out. This project also has rather spotty, user contributed-feeling documentation, but has an active and vibrant community to help balance that out. Also backed by a support organization if you want commercial support, and you can license the software cheaply for commercial purposes if you want to brand the administrative user interface. We will be taking a much closer look at this project in the near future as well.

[UPDATE:Here is a link to the Umbraco 4.0 beta page. This page provides an overview of the new features, as well as links to download a developer preview and a screencast on installing the developer preview.]

Portal Engine & Enterprise CMS - this project is open source, but not available yet. They seem to be preparing for an imminent beta release, but no source code as of yet. Of all the products I’ve evaluated so far, commercial or open source, this one has me the most excited by far. I do hope it becomes available in time for us to leverage it (and that it is all that it appears to be).

As of this afternoon (10/1/2008) the Sense/Net Beta 1 of this product is available on CodePlex. The product home page is here.

Here is how they bill themselves:

Sense/Net Portal Engine is an Open Source application suite for building integrated Enterprise Content Management (ECM, ECMS) and Enterprise Portal (EPS) solutions running on the .Net and Mono platform. Sense/Net Portal Engine TNG is an Open Source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint

Sounds great eh? It looks beautiful, appears to be backed by a large team, and also has a support organization. Actually, it is the next generation re-write of an established commercial ECMS product. The open source version is the next iteration, appropriately suffixed with TNG -  "The Next Generation." They cite as a motivation for the project the lack of an enterprise grade CMS in the open source, .NET space, and I have felt that same vacuum myself, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. The best part, for me, is that they are providing a technology that I believe can be used outside the portal engine called the Portal File System, which is a robust, open source, hierarchical content repository with versioning and security, etc, like the Java cats have had forever but unlike anything that can be found in .NET (that I have been able to find). You can sign up for the beta, but you don’t get an e-mail when you do that confirms your request, so hopefully the sign-up is functional. Their blog is here: http://blog.portalengine.org/

Other open source projects I haven’t looked closely at:

http://n2cms.com/
http://www.devage.com/

And a nascent but active CMS being build on the new ASP.NET MVC framework:

http://www.codeplex.com/MVCMS

We’ll continue to explore, and report back once we’ve managed to build a few prototypes on the various platforms.

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ASP.NET, CMS, Content Management Systems, Web Development
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Viewing 21 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    I would take a closer look at DNN. If you are a C# shop you know that you can combine .net languages. DNN can be extended by way of C# dlls if you like.
    • ^
    • v
    Yes, I know - the VB thing is really a pretty petty bias on my part, but I like to study the code of the open source tools I use, and I just really don't like to read VB.NET. That isn't the main reason we passed over DNN though, I've looked at it pretty closely several times over the years and ultimately decided against it (although is has been more than a year now so maybe it deserves another look).
    • ^
    • v
    Nathan,

    I enjoyed reading your assesment of both our product and our competitors. I would be glad to chat with you about a pricing model that we offer that you may not be aware of. based on your comment, "I like this company a lot - BUT - you need to buy a server license for each URL" it would seem that you have a slight mis-interpertation of the Ektron pricing model. Again, I would be glad to clarify.

    Best,

    David T. Maffei
    Director of Sales
    Ektron, Inc.
    • ^
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    Hi Nathan!
    I am the product manager of Sense/Net Portal Engine TNG. I am more that happy to see your post, and many thanks for writing good things about us. :)
    TNg will be available for download in September. We are working on a 1st release, that is good enough for a public download. As of now, we are working on the portal of one of our big customers, so we do not have time for managing a public beta program. Keep checking back to our blog.
    • ^
    • v
    Nathan -- I usually just read blogs and don't comment much but couldnt help myself since I know David Maffei and I have used Ektron (and I like to engage in open source vs commercial discussions).

    That being said, you have a tough decision it seems. Some time back we were engaged by a client to do a similar review of CMS packages (.net was a requirement) and despite the time lapse between our projects, we found many of the same options. You’re right, the UI hasn’t changed much in design but then again they keep adding new features. The reason I wanted to post was that you noted how helpful they are and that is my main reason for choosing Ektron on an ongoing basis. It is not just sales that is helpful, their support team is also and that is a huge requirement for me. From a commercial standpoint, pound for pound, I like Ektron.

    But in open source land, now that is a harder choice to make. I have used DNN, Rainbow and Umbraco. I liked Umbraco the most and have used it for projects. However, when going through the risk-benefit analysis with the client, it was always with that discussion on the differences between open source and commercial support (or open source with commercial support features) which is not always an apples-to-apples comparison. As a developer it might of note that with Umbraco you load the templates through the CMS admin itself where in many other systems you build the templates in VS and cms api’s and push them to the server. As many things in development, each has their own benefits, so the development process for each product needs to be considered. PHP offers an even broader range of open source CMS products with vary styles of support and for the right company/project might be good options as well.

    Wow, more long winded than I thought, but these things may be of interest to you, if not, well, I tried. I will be interested to see where you head going forward. It may be that the at the end of the day, you choose as I do, a commercial product (like Ektron) for those instances where you wish the security of knowing that you can call a live person and open source when the client/project is more suited toward community based support. Don’t get me wrong, there are some fantastic community supported projects, but I have had occasion that ‘my particular issue’ was of little interest to the community as a whole but of large interest to me so I keep that in mind too.

    Thanks for putting this out there,

    David
    • ^
    • v
    Nathan,
    I think EPiServer CMS is an excellent framework for developing web sites. Easy to use and very well integrated in ASP.NET. EPiServer is based in Europe and they started their global expansion programme last year, so I'm sorry you did not find so many partners i US yet.

    I work for a company specialised in EPiServer, let me know if you need help with evaluation and licenses.

    /Fredrik
    • ^
    • v
    @Fredrik - thanks for the offer, but if I am unable to contact anyone in the company directly (and I tried pretty hard), then it isn't for us. I shudder to think about what support will be like if I can't even get a salesperson to talk to me!
    • ^
    • v
    @David L. - thanks for the valuable feedback. As I said in my post, if we were a consulting firm creating solutions for clients, I probably would have sighed on the dotted line with Ektron. Our licensing requirements are a bit trickier though. Not so say they don't have a model that can work for us, it is just more complicated.
    • ^
    • v
    Hiya Nathan,

    We have begun to use Cuyahoga as our chosen framework, and its a real joy. The 2.0 beta has some great features that work for us and our plan to move into SaaS.

    We are building some social networking modules at the moment, I'll let you know how we get on.

    Mayur
    • ^
    • v
    DNN is a terrible, terrible base as an application platform of any sort. To provide cheap webhosting for starcraft fansites and catteries it does the job. For anything else, just run away; the code smells like a sewer and the community is cliquey and defensive.

    I'm a long time Umbraco user who has just started looking at N2 CMS, and from what I can see it is a very nice design, with great code quality and test coverage.

    Unlike most CMS's I have seen, it gets its document model from your code, which you decorate with attributes to specifiy editor types. A very elegant model indeed if you do not need to give schema design time abilities to your end users. Like umbraco 4, it uses masterpages and aspx for its templating, so it is all fully source controllable - that was a big problem with umbraco <4.
    • ^
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    No worries Nathan. I just found it very interesting that we had such similar searches, even if for diff reason, and had to chime in since I knew Maffei. If you can work it out licensing wise, I dont think you would be disappointed with Ektron, but I leave that to you. :-) If you do talk to Maffei, tell him I said Hi!

    Take care and good luck.
    • ^
    • v
    @ Mayur - I didn't know Cuyahoga had a 2.0 beta - very exciting. Please do let me know how your social networking modules come along, especially if you decide to open source them :)
    • ^
    • v
    Ryan, I haven't really even looked at N2, but I will now. We do not need to give schema editing capabilities to end users, that model sounds interesting. Have you contributed to the Umbraco source? I believe I've seen your name around Codeplex in connection with Umbraco before. (It stands out because an old friend of mine is named Ryan Roberts. I presume you are not he :)
    • ^
    • v
    Thanks David, I'll tell him you said hi.
    • ^
    • v
    >Have you contributed to the Umbraco source?

    You have probably seen my name on a search engine extension for umbraco that handles related pages by metadata and tag cloud type scenarios. You may well have also cursed me had you tried to use it before a colleage of mine pointed at the correct index file.

    So I am a Ryan Roberts, but not the Ryan Roberts.
    • ^
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    Hiya Nathan, we are planning to open source them. We are currently just out of prototyping and now into building the module for a couple of clients.

    Send me your email address and I'll follow up with details of what we are up to and where we are at.

    Cheers,

    Mayur
    • ^
    • v
    Wow. Completely great list. Appreciate you taking the time to put this list together.

    -Ryan
    • ^
    • v
    My pleasure. If you end up trying one or more of these, stop by and let us know how it went :)