Would N2 or Composite be a more suitable CMS to use to manage a small business website?
N2 CMS is more of a platform for building a CMS rather than a fully featured CMS in it's own right. There is though, an example implementation to get you started. I would think that that Composite C1 or Orchard is likely to give you a quicker start at building a small business website if you're starting from scratch. However I think N2 be of use if you ever need to build CMS function into an existing site (but this would be quite difficult with the other two I've mentioned).
Edit:
C1 and Orchard also seem to be under more active development than N2 which doesn't appear to have had any new releases since early 2011.
You can install C1 and Orchard pretty easily from Microsoft's Web Platform Installer. With C1, choose the Omnicorp demo site to see a sample deployment with a few pages already created as this will be the quickest way to evaluate it. Installing from the WPI is probably a faster approach than installing it from source for the purposes of evaluation.
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I have requirements to establish a CMS system for enterprise and it has to be java based open source, I found out that liferay has CMS capabilities but I'm not able to find any detailed description of the features introduced on its CMS , also I found some people are talking about integrating Liferay with Alfresco ! does this mean that Liferay is not a complete CMS ? appreciate if anyone can guide me through this and provide me with any resources detailing liferay CMS features
Yes, Liferay has CMS features - coming from a portal background the CMS is only one of the many features delivered out of the box. A portal typically is an integration platform for any kind of application. If you ever only need CMS, it might be that "pure" CMS products offer a bit more of functionality, however, many people are very happy with the CMS functionality Liferay provides. And if you're not, it's typically easy to extend (this is the point of a portal).
Systems that start being a CMS and want to extend that with applications (who doesn't want that) typically have a different mindset - "everything is content" - and naturally your application feels a bit more like "content". The portlet standard, together with the additional APIs that you have available, is a nice way to start.
For CMSs the way to go is typically a proprietary API to extend it. In a portal, a CMS is one of the possible applications available.
Regarding Alfresco: Yes, you can combine it with Liferay. While Alfresco tends to come more from the Content-side, Liferay comes from the portal/integration side. I'd ask you to evaluate both first and see if you are missing vital features in any. Then evaluate which pain you'd like better: 1) Add the missing features you want in the system you decide for, or 2) integrate both systems and run them both. Of course, the optimum result is if only one of the two is sufficient for your requirements. Then project into the future and try to find out what you'll miss first.
There is no correct answer to this question, it all depends on your requirements, experience and ability to learn and administrate one or both of the systems.
Disclaimer: See my profile to detect my implicit bias - I hope to not stress it too much in this answer.
We are looking for a Asp.net CMS to integrate in our existing Enterprise-Webapplication. Some requirements:
Full integration in Visual Studio 2010 and our existing Application (so no Umbraco)
Common ASP.NET Web Forms Developing practices (Global.asax, Masterpages, User-/Custom-Controls)
Security (FormsAuthentication, custom Membership-/RoleProvider)
Very flexible and extendable (good API)
Lightweights CMS with good performance (thousands of simultaneous requests)
Easy content editing
At the moment we are looking at Sitefinity and N2CMS.
I really like the N2CMS approach (Integrate CMS engine in application) but is it mature enough for "real" usage scenarios? Is there another alternative to N2CMS?
Yes, N2 is mature. Company I work for is using it for more than three years now for various projects, and it is still our platform of choice. Best thing about it is that it is not CM System in a classic manner but rather CM Framework with several layers, meaning you have many things implemented, but they are not part of the core. As a result, you can change almost anything that is not usually changeable in other CMSes.
Also, whole architecture is organized in such a way that you can easily override almost any system behavior with your own implementation. Example? Imagine you reached 100s of news entries under News folder in site tree, and you decide to completely hide them from site tree, instead implementing plugin for manipulating them. Solution? Attribute-decorated class with 10 lines of code for hiding items in a tree based on your custom rule expressed in C# code.
I think N2 is pretty polished product and that you can go for it without too much worries.
We too are using N2. We've used it for a campaign site and now we are building our companies corporate website and the 20-or-so country specific subsidiary sites.
It is very fast to develop on (if you are a .net programmer it is a treat, an html-guy might find it difficult). Extremely flexible and extensible. And so far it seems to be very mature and stable. It has less features in terms of workflow-management than e.g. sitecore, but then again most customers put a lot of emphasis on those things, when they evaluate options, but end up not using them. So I don't think that is a problem.
The problem we are having is that it doesn't properly support preview, so website editors cannot preview their changes before publishing them. It is supposed to be done at some point, but there is no word on when.
Full disclosure, I work for Telerik and I'm the Sitefinity Evangelist.
Full integration in Visual Studio 2010 and our existing Application (so no Umbraco)
This is a difficult item to claim with a blanket statement.
I don't know much about your existing application. Our customers have accomplished a lot of Sitefinity integrations with various applications. This could be done through web services, custom controls or simply accounting for external URL's in Sitefinity's sitemap. Feel free to post to our Sitefinity forums for recommendations for your specific scenario.
Regarding Visual Studio integration, Sitefinity includes Telerik RadControls and OpenAccess ORM. We also try to align ourselves closely with traditional ASP.NET technologies.
Common ASP.NET Web Forms Developing practices
Sitefinity Templates = ASP.NET Master Pages
Editable CMS regions = ContentPlaceHolders
Sitefinity Widgets = ASP.NET Controls
Sitefinity Themes = ASP.NET Themes
We make the marketing claim "if you know ASP.NET, then you know Sitefinity". However, realistically all products comes with some learning curve. As much as possible we try to align ourselves with the experience ASP.NET developers already have.
Security (FormsAuthentication, custom Membership-/RoleProvider)
Sitefinity's authentication is based on traditional ASP.NET Membership & Role providers. We've included a couple (Sitefinity & Active Directory) but you can extend with your own.
Very flexible and extendable (good API)
Our API is LINQ enabled and we also have a Fluent API. We also have a full RESTful web service API.
Lightweight CMS with good performance (thousands of simultaneous requests)
Our own Telerik web sites run on Sitefinity, and many of our customers support web sites that handle a large volume of traffic.
However, I'm not sure what constitutes "lightweight". Many CMS's have little overhead, but also do very little. We've tried to deliver a lot of features and end-user friendliness with Sitefinity. This comes at the cost of some overhead.
Managing the balance between a CMS that "helps you" and "gets out of your way" is a constant challenge. The best I can promise is that we're aware of the challenge and we're doing our best to deliver effective results.
Easy content editing
Judge for yourself. Even better, download the product and let your content editors experiment. We welcome the comparison. Over & over again, this becomes our differentiator.
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Hopefully this post doesn't sound like a lot of evangelist BS. I've tried to be accurate with my answers. Best of luck with your project.
i need to put a corporate site under a cms, which i haven't finally chosen yet, and have some tight requirements for it:
it should be very well organized at a code level, as i'm a developer and i need to add some very custom functionality to the site;
ability to create custom content types (a la drupal's cck does);
very good i18n abilities as the site will be multilingual to and fro;
caching / performance control solutions as the site experiences tens of thousands unique hosts a day;
publishing features like pre-moderation, authoring and versioning;
sending custom emails;
creating custom web forms with input data validation;
content access levels;
i would like to have my static content (images / css / pdf's etc) on a separate domain (possibly hosted on amazon cloud) processed by caching proxy server like nginx -- not a tight requirement, but still;
i evaluated these requirements and came up with ez publish as a solution. i'm not very experienced in cms world; i've worked with drupal and wordpress, but, being good cms'es, none of these meet my requirements (drupal isn't good at a code level and wordpress is a blog solution). also i don't want to mess with joomla or complexity of typo3. so, my question is -- does ez publish have a competitor in this field, regardless of the implemention language?
Given that you already went through a clear requirement analysis and already figured that eZ Publish meets them all, there is no other need for me than pointing you to the very welcoming eZ Publish Community, in case you would like to have more in-depth, real-life feedback on every of your points above, by eZ Community members.
You can find them there : http://share.ez.no
A recent code-level comparison between eZ Publish & Drupal confirms your intuition : http://share.ez.no/blogs/marko-zmak/ezpublish-vs.-drupal
I must confess i liked reading your :
.. and wordpress is a blog solution
Cheers,
I'd have to agree with Nicolas. I worked for about 4 years doing custom CMS integration for companies of all different sizes and requirements and to this day I haven't found an open source CMS that has the abilities of eZ Publish.
During that time I also did a lot of implementations of "Conversational Marketing" (blogs with marketing purposes) and they were of course all in WordPress. WordPress can be extended to do a lot of different things, but you're very correct in your pigeonholing of it as a blog solution. Any customization of it requires you to extrapolate your problem as if it was a blogging issue.
With eZ Publish, the community involvement is very expansive and the core of the CMS is built to be customized in any way you would like.
Best of luck, and I would agree with your choice and Nicolas's vote for it.
eZ Publish is definitely the right answer here as it meets to all your requirements by its built-in features or by its extensions.
Yes, eZ Publish learning curve can be tough, but it worths the effort !
eZ Publish will definitely deliver all of those functional requirements almost 100% out-of-the-box. Also, check out the eZ Components / Zeta Components library used by that CMS. Feature-wise TYPO3 is also strong but the code isn't so clean ( IMHO ).
The only other system I know of that can come close is Plone CMS ( Python based ).
I have got a project from a model who wants to build a site similar to oprah.com
I went through oprah.com and tried to find the CMS it is using but failed miserably. Does anyone has any ideas?
Moreover, which Joomla! components can be used to mimic the Oprah's site?
This is a custom built site, which was built ofver several years. I do not know about the CMS, but it does use J2EE, Oracle DBMS and Autonomy’s IDOL search and personalization engine and Jive’s Clearspace collaboration software for discussion forums and blogs. I would predict therefore that the CMS is either bespoke or another paid for CMS solution. I agree with pharalia - it is definately not an php-based open-source product such as Wordpress or Joomla
You could easily replicate this look in Joomla, or Wordpress or Drupal for that matter. Since I know Joomla best and you asked, I would use K2 with a couple of different display modules for a site like this. RokStories and RokTabs come to mind but there are all kinds of K2 compatible modules out there now.
That said, I'm not sure I would want to replicate a site this old. It makes some really basic mistakes that Oprah might be able to get away with, but someone with less star power is going to have problems.
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This question is a little subjective, however, it aims to give me a bit of information about whether it is better to build or buy.
My company is looking to enter the world of CMSs for our clients websites, do we provide an open source one, or do we build our own model from scratch?
If you buy, which do you use?
If you build, how does your architecture differ?
EDIT: The CMS we are looking to use isn't to maintain our own website, it is something we can offer our clients and pinned onto websites we are custom building for them, it needs to be something that we adapt and manipulate easily for many different website designs and purposes.
How about using opensource one? :-)
Today the only reasons to develop new CMS are:
1) non-usual requirements (deadly rare)
2) You just like to code "your own CMS" (c)
If none is the case, take opensource one.
Personally, I have my own CMS for all my private & commercial purposes, but this was mostly just for programming fun. If you need to deliver, you have to use existing products.
The company I work for wrestled with this same question recently. This depends a lot on your client's expertise and needs. It's generally not advisable to build your own CMS unless you're using it to offer something very novel.
Drupal has lots of plugins available giving a great deal of customizability. It's handy in the same way that most CMSs are in that you can use PHP files as your templates and code them outside of the CMS.
Wordpress has the best user interface of all the CMS's I've used (Drupal, EE, Wordpress, Joomla). If you need to program plugins it's also very well documented and (when the plugin is finished) provides a drag-and-drop interface for the client to make changes to their own web site easily.
I'm currently in the process of moving our site from EE to WP.
Well I can build a simple CMS in less than a day (and everybody can do that with any good web framework). So it depends on how complex it is and how much the open source solutions can do what you want your CMS to do. I generally avoid to use open source CMS because it is usually an overkill compared with my usual client's needs but that's me. Most open source CMS (drupal, joomla, wordpress) have many features that most people simply don't care and they clutter their user interface, so I prefer to build my own as far as it is simple instead of using an open source and struggling to add a new feature and make it scalable.
First, to address your build or "buy" questions - you would be crazy to build. The resourced needed to support code you write as it changes to meet each clients needs will end up costing you a fortune in the long run. It's hard to beat the resources of thousands of developers that many of the big projects have. Does your firm have a security specialist? How about a QA team that constantly searches for ans squashes bugs? Unless you are trying to do a one off, highly specialized application, pick a CMS and go with it.
Next, as far as being able to implement the CMS across many types of sites, that is entirely dependent on your firms developers. If your developer knows XYZ CMS, then he should be able to take any design and make it work for the CMS. Any good CMS has the design layer completely separated from the content and code so the design should not be limited by the CMS in any way. It's just a matter of learning the particular templating system employed by the CMS of your choice.
Last, I am surprised that no one has mentioned the solution to your wanting to limit the amount of control your clients have over their sites. As mentioned you can go the SaaS route and never give the client access to the administrative back end of the site. Any of the good CMS projects offer front end editing. This will allow your client to add/remove/edit the content on the site without giving them access to anything structure or design related. You can completely control the admin, layout, and functionality while the client simply controls the content only, which seems like what you are trying to accomplish.
This depends heavily on what you need, but many CMSs are a platform that you can build upon, getting the best of both worlds.
Wordpress has a very rich plug-in framework.
If you are ok with Windows servers, SharePoint has an extensive plug-in/extension architecture.
I don't think there's any reason to build from scratch unless you are planning to compete in the CMS market.
Do not reinvent the wheel. It takes really a lot of time and money to make a CMS.
If I were you, I would go with an open source CMS, start building custom stuff and contribute back what you can (this is how the company works where I work).
My choice is Drupal, because of the rich set of contribs, excellent flexibility/extensibility and good security.
I think it depends on how many clients are supposed to use the CMS.
We have only one client and built a proprietary CMS which we heavily customize to the client's specific needs.
It also gives us a strategic benefit since this client can hardly migrate his web sites to another company now.
If you have a couple (> 2) of clients who are supposed to use the CMS, IMHO an open source CMS would be the best choice.
Can you develop a new CMS as good as some other ones that have been around for years and hundreds of people have worked on it's development?
That's a question I always ask myself at the start of every website buliding project.
There is surely a good open source platform that meets your requierments and that you can improve.
I suggest these:
Liferay : for large organisations and advanced projects it's written in java. I personally love this CMS. Big places like NASA use it and my company used it for a project, it was great.
Plone : Same as above - language = Python
EZPublish for large organisations but not as advanced as Liferay - language = PHP
Joomla and drupal for normal websites.
As a design agency, presumably with a number of customers with live websites that constantly need to change that are taking manpower away from new projects,
My first question would be if I intend to migrate my existing customers to the CMS based version of their site
Then, What are the commonalities/differences in your customer sites?
If there is a lot of commonality (in the back end code as opposed to the front end design), then maybe integrating a basic article editor is all you need?
Look at how a CMS is going to affect your design flow, Your designs will then be CMS 'Themes', that'll be a learning curve.
I'm not trying to discourage you from Buying or Building a CMS, but the decision will be completely decided by your companies situation.
Personally I use Joomla and DotNetNuke. I'm a developer not a designer, so I buy off the shelf themes and modify them. I also had no existing clients when I started out. I decided to use a CMS specifically because I could buy themes, and secondry to that was the client modifying the articles.
I cant think of an open source CMS that doesn't provide everything that most companies would need.
you get the benefits of bug fixes, little deployment time and ease of documentation.
When selecting the CMS try to use one that is not too bulky or not too popular.
most CMS allow for easy expansion so if a client has special needs then its easy to add functionality.
A reason that you start to build you're CMS could be because the landscape of CMS systems is big (and you can't make up your mind on one system to put in all you're energy).
Do you want a simple CMS for a website, an integrations framework or personalization / social media.
As there are a lot of OS CMS out there, I wouldn't recommend you to start from scratch. Check for research EG:
http://www.slideshare.net/OpenSourceCMS/451-group-future-of-web-content-management-open-source-cms
Also check the OS license of products and how this could affect your projects.
Good luck!
Lots of good responses already, but I don't see anyone talking about the real users, the customer who is paying for this site.
One reason a CMS product is often better is that it can give you a lot of help material, usability refinements and add-ons that you won't get when you build it yourself. More importantly for the end-users, it can mean they extend and add to the site without needing to get IT to give them permission (and the run-around on budget/resources) to do so.
Another issue is that if you build it yourself, then that is the only copy of that software that is being security tested and probed. A product will have been through more penetration tests and probing.
On the other hand there are a wealth of CMS' out there and it can be confusing if you do not know what you want. The CMS Matrix is a good site for comparing all sorts of CMS' to find one that suits your needs.
I work for a CMS vendor, Elcom Technology, so I am slightly biased - but I have also used WordPress, SharePoint, DotNetNuke, Joomla and Drupal to various levels of degree and they all offer a big step up over something home-built.
A very important reason why you may want to choose something that is already made (FOSS or commercial) is that someone else may be able to support it.
PS
I've used CMSMS on various projects. It has enough user control to let them edit, but not mess with the layout and stuff.