Increasingly, I have noticed the number of Content Management Systems in use. I have some familiarity with SiteCore. I have read some literature on Umbraco. I only just got wind of Orchard the other day. I have only heard positive feedback about EPiServer. I am soon to move into a role that uses it.
Do these differ vastly in features and price? What has led you to choose one (or several) over the others?
EDIT
I did a brief review of so-called free CMSs here: On Free Microsoft Compatible Content Management Systems
Reasons I ditched Orchard when developing a 50k page website:
The Orchard CMS import tool is simply too slow. It would only accept
small batches at a time. Initially, it took eight minutes to import
1000 records. So, working on that principle I expected that it could
take seven hours to import all the records. Unfortunately, I started
to receive performance issues as more records were inserted into the
database. I even started to reduce the batch size, which helped only
temporarily in the early stages. (See Saying no to Orchard)
I can only comment mainly on Sitecore and a bit on Umbraco from my knowledge of others using it:
Sitecore is an enterprise level web CMS with an "enterprise price tag." It's very extensible, has a lot of developer/community support, and is very developer friendly. The structure of content is based on a tree of nodes with parent-children relationships. Sitecore is well known in the WCM community as a leader in content management and is rated very well by companies sch as Forrester Research, etc.
Based on my previous research and conversations with friends, Umbraco is very similar to Sitecore. It has a lower price compared to Sitecore but its not a complete rip off. Umbraco is also built on ASP.NET like Sitecore.
Here's a three-part series on Sitecore vs. Umbraco from a developer.
Of the ones you mention above, I have only used Umbraco and Sitecore to build with and am certified in both. I like the way they allow me to build systems that really work well for my customers. They both have a feel that they simply give you building blocks to create your masterpiece instead of "modules" of functionality plugged in that give you a blog, forum, etc. They make it really easy to share content throughout the site and create really nice admin experiences.
Umbraco's community is really great. They both struggle a little on the documentation side IMO, but Umbraco's videos really help and the community is quick to help. Also, if you're talking cost then its free (Umbraco) vs. quite expensive (Sitecore).
But the reality is that each developer has their own taste and the style of CMS they like to work with. Ultimately, its the team that has to build the site that really matters most when it comes to how each CMS performs for the end user.
In addition to the links above, here are a couple blog posts that may help you get a feel for the different systems:
Orchard & Umbraco - Introduction (part 1 of 4) - Aaron Powell
Sitecore vs. Umbraco Terminology
Good luck!
I mostly work with EPiServer and Sitecore, and I can tell you the difference in short:
Sitecore has broader architecture and more powerfull UI. CMS is deeply configurable and highly extensible, it has clever publishing and caching system, powerful search and page editor. But it doesn't provide much out of box and UI is pretty old, slow and hard to learn. So this will be a long journey until you understand it good and make a good support of all its features for editors.
EPiServer is easy, friendly to users and developers. It provides an essential bunch of features out of box, has easy UI and page editor, good drag-and-drop experience, easy personalization. It is code-first, distributed with NuGet, provides dependency injection for its services, out of box MVC support. But it's not so extensible and configurable, has pure search (without expensive EPiFind module) and generally lower-featured comparing to Sitecore. So it's good for small/middle websites, but can be an obstacle in complex solutions.
Both have similar tree-item concept, rich documentation, pure public module system and hard UI customization. Both expensive and not open source.
As I know, Umbraco is pretty similar to EPiServer and Sitecore, but free and open source. Of course you get less features, more bugs, not much docs and no free support.
Orchard is really different comparing to other three CMS. It is module-based like Wordpress: you use standard or public modules and themes, instead of writing the whole website from scratch. You create your own themes and modules to customize the website and CMS. So entire CMS is highly extensible and provides a lot of free community modules. But in the same time you lose control and learning curve is much longer. Orchard is free and open-source, entirely MVC-based, UI and API are well done, but it can be hard for both developers and editors to understand it.
Wordpress vs Episerver:
http://tedgustaf.com/blog/2011/2/comparison-of-episerver-and-wordpress/
OK so the guy who wrote that is an Episerver consultant but it's interesting and balanced.
All the different web content management systems have different strengths. So which one is best for you depends a lot on what kind of sites you create, what kind of budget you have and what you think matters the most in a CMS.
For example, Orchard and SiteCore are VERY different systems.
I'm a bit biased as I work there, but I believe that Webnodes CMS have several important advantages over the systems you mention.
Keywords: Relations between content, actual classes for the different content types, custom LINQ provider for all data access, expose all content as an OData endpoint etc.
Microsoft used our CMS to demonstrate OData at Mix11. Video from Mix 11
Related
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.
--
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.
At this point we are developing Sitecore websites and we are gaining experience every day. This means that we know how to adjust our approach to different types of customers and that we are able to build our applications quicker every project we do. Of course Sitecore is not the only W-CMS around and we have looked into other W-CMS's.
What are the pro's and the con's for a company to offer solutions in different types of CMS's and what would this mean for the programmers that are working with this CMS?
Would a choice to offer solutions in more CMS's automatically mean that the global experience per CMS will shrink relative?
Hope there are some people around with experience in multiple big W-CMS's (Sitecore, KEntico, EPIServer, etc.. etc..).
If you truly enjoy working with Sitecore than maybe consider Umbraco. Umbraco is very similar to Sitecore and cheaper (I believe former Sitecore employees may even work there). It might be nice to offer a high-priced CMS (SC) and a less expensive alternative also built on .NET (Umbraco). I would say don't try to support tons of CMS's since there are so many. Keep a focus on a select few. Maybe consider selecting others based on the market for them and how their partner programs work (i.e. like Sitecore will recommend you as a solution partner and help you with sales).
Are you prepared to keep your programmers skills on top of each of the different CMS solutions you'd offer? That can be a high cost if you offer a number of different solutions based on different platforms,e.g. if you have programmers that have to know C#, Java and PHP because in this is what the various CMS support development be done. Thus, you may want to stick to .Net CMS rather than go venturing too far into a different stack as that can carry the challenge of maintaining skills.
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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.
I have got one project where I need to build a site in Sitecore CMS.
I have never used that CMS.
I want to know that if my programming skills are good because I don't know ASP or ASP.net but do know PHP.
The sites are simple html pages with no logins and processing.
Can I do it few weeks?
I was a PHP person when my company switched to Sitecore, although we had an ASP.net developer.
99% of what is done in Sitecore is achieved without any .net programming requirement. A website consists of data templates, which are defined in the Sitecore desktop environment (much like Windows, but in a browser). Data templates define the fields that each type of page has, the workflow it is in and other content-centric things. Renders are then attached to the template - these are xslt files which take the data provided by the data template and format it into (x)html.
I'd recommend getting enrolled on the Sitecore Developer Training - this is a one day course which will get you fully set up and ready to start building.
http://www.sitecore.net/en/Training.aspx
Sitecore v6 is easier to build with than v5. There's also SDN (sdn.sitecore.net) which has a large amount of documentation and examples.
Also, as Sitecore is only available through Sitecore Partners, you should have access to a knowledgeable Sitecore Professional.
Seems like it's real easy.
http://www.sitecore.net/en/Products/Sitecore-CMS.aspx
Sitecore Makes it Effortless to Create Content and Experience Rich Websites
Sitecore helps you achieve your business goals such as increasing sales and search engine visibility, while being straightforward to integrate and administer. Sitecore lets you deliver sites that are highly scalable, robust and secure, and is built to simplify your life, automate your processes, and let you deliver results faster.
Seriously, this question can't be answered as is. Sitecore CMS can be used by business users with no dev experience and it can be used by developers to do more complicated things. How complicated it is to use Sitecore depends entirely on what exactly you're trying to do. It might be easy, it might be complicated, but without more details it's impossible to know.
Is there any CMS such as expression engine or wordpress that allows a user to click a button and convert all the text to another language (it would have to be human generated otherwise it has too many mistakes probably).
I'd like to know if there are any good solutions out there that work for real world use, in like business company websites.
Tridion CMS is designed to assist in website translation. They even have translation services to help you through the process of translating your content. It is not a cheap solution but is a viable solution.
As noted above - this is a huge topic and not easily answered briefly. But here are some things to consider...
NO CMS on the market today elegantly interoperates, out of the box, with translation technology for use in real-world translation projects. Reports from clients we've worked with have even raised concerns about the SDL integration.
At best - a handful of CMS's either offer very light-weight features that "appear" to help (side-by-side editing that prevents use of TM) but don't scale or have modest oem connectors to captive translation providers (CQ5<>TDC).
If your needs are modest - these might work fine.
But if you're serious about localization and have a moderate to high volume of content and want to work with any translation provider - you need a proper, rich, scalable integration between your CMS and the TMS (translation management system) used by your Translation firm (LSP).
Regrettably - these are scarce. We do nothing BUT build these connectors and use a neutral platform to provide direct integration all sorts of translation providers and technologies, the full SDL suite included - and still we've only been able to build a few rich CMS plug-in connectors because they are very complicated and require substantial development effort - IF they are going to be useful.
But the CMS choice you make should be driven as much by your broader needs. Localization should only be one facet of the decision process.
I guess the harsh reality is that there is NO CMS that will do what you descibe without smoe modification or a connector.
RK
I would recoomend you to use Kentico CMS.
See the video on Multilingual support in Kentico CMS:
http://devnet.kentico.com/Blogs/Martin-Hejtmanek/March-2010/Webinar-5---Multilingual-support-in-Kentico-CMS.aspx
Kentico CMS offers multilingual functionality including Right-to-Left languages and Eastern languages. Please see some "live" examples:
Site in 10 languages (incl. Chinese) : http://www.chep.com
Site in 7 languages (incl. Japan, Korean): http://www.wayoutback.com
Arabic: http://www.scb.gov.sa/
Hebrew: http://www.medicsfile.co.il/
Chinese: http://www.royalcaribbean-asia.com/?lang=zh-CN
Hindi site: http://www.rajasthantourism.gov.in/
More details on multiple languages support:
http://www.kentico.com/cms-asp-net-features/Content-management/Multiple-languages.aspx
Kentico also offers Translation Management:
http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/index.html?translation_management_overview.htm
Especially the translation status overview makes it really easy to manage multilingual web sites. If only a part of web site is translated then you can set to combine the rest with the original language without adding the missing pages in it manually.
By default Hippo CMS utilizes Google Translate, but you can plugin your own translation engine / review process. See for more information: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/hippo-cms-75-launched-introduces-drag-drop-layout-localization-channel-management-010391.php/
If your organization already uses SDL for translation services then using SDL Tridion is a natural choice because of the built-in connector to send Tridion content for translation using a right-click on the GUI item. After translation, it is updated in the CMS and the author is notified.
SDL Bought Tridion a few years ago and has been maturing this solution since then. Today it is available in the current release, Tridion 2011 SP1, and is compatible with both World Server and Translation Management Server.
This is all human translation and any solution that honestly recommends machine translation for final content is not serious about it.
Drupal 8 is the best option available for Multilingual capability... Although you have to wait a little bit for its release, You will get a good result. Also earlier versions of drupal including Drupal 7 supports multilingual functionality.
But Drupal 8 will have more features...With Drupal 8 multilingual functionality, it is possible to translate anything in the system.
The multilingual functionality provides language configuration, assignment and detection functionality. It also provides a user interface to the existing back-end support for automatic software translation. Now it’s more easier to translate contents with the build-in user interfaces.
Plz refer the link for more detailed info Drupal 8- What’s new and Expected Inside
Day Communique (CQ5 - now ADEP), in combination with a third-party translation vendor, can do this job.
In Communique/ADEP, you manage your pages in whatever native language you choose. Once they are done, you kick off a translations workflow. This will go to your translation vendor (of which there are several). The vendor will have a human translate it, and possibly also use software to speed up the translation process. It will come back to you for approval in the workflow, if you wish. Otherwise, it will just be published to your web site.
So yes, from the user's perspective, one click can indeed translate a page in multiple languages, and publish it to multiple web sites. Our company is doing this, only we are doing our own in-house translation.
I have not used this, but I looked into it awhile ago and this looks to be the best solutions I have seen.
http://umbraco.org/blog/2009/3/25/microsoft-translator-and-umbraco
That is not how major businesses do translation. It's good for quick and dirty, general idea translation, but it's not for anyone serious about messaging to multiple languages and cultures. Typically, businesses work with translation vendors and grow translation memories that help to guide content authors to creating a consistent message and to reuse content (keeping translation costs down).
This is a big subject, not a small one. Honestly, I'm kind of flabbergasted at how to answer this question, so I'll stop here.