Reviews/Comparison of Open Source ASP.NET MVC CMS
I am looking for an open source CMS for ASP.NET MVC. I have found MvcCms, N2, and AtomicCMS. I'm looking for any advice, anecdotes, resources or articles comparing the different open source projects so I can find the best one for my project. I'd like to find information about the features, extensibility, relative reliability and continued development of the different projects. Thanks guys.
Answer
You ought to look at Orchard CMS. It was released a few days ago, so still in its infancy. We are having a very close look as most clients want this kind of thing.
Orchard is open source, but it is part of Microsoft's push for MVC 3. So there are a lot of very good brains behind it.
On the other hand, there is a rule whereby you only take an MS product seriously when version 3 comes out. What I think you will find is that they will rattle out the versions quite quickly, so I would bet on this one.
To date, we use Telerik Sitefinity for all CMS. The pros are that it uses master pages, so no new skills. The cons, it is slow and I have found it tedious to customise.
Still, it delivers good websites. For example, one we did (still under development):
It is entirely updated by the staff who definitely NOT technically minded.
However, Sitefinity is not MVC, so I will get increasingly out of date with it, plus you have to pay for commercial sites (from US$ 499).
Orchard is free and will get a big community eco system, so will evolve quickly. I suspect Orchard will kill off all the other free MVC CMS.
That's my bet, and it has always paid to bet on Microsoft...