DotNetNuke vs Sitefinity
In 2009 Readers' Choice awards, in the Web Content Management category,DotNetNuke Professional Edition took the runner up spot and Telerik's Sitefinity CMS received an honorable mention, dropping down from the runner up spot last year. I have used both and believe they are great products, DNN being opensource and with broader community, Sitefinity with its suite of radcontrols...
I would like to know what are your thoughts on when to choose one product over the other. What would make Sitefinity a better fit than DNN and viceversa?
Below are some features of Sitefinity which usually are considered an advantage when making a decision:
- In Sitefinity CMS you can use master pages and themes from Visual Studio to build templates. Creating templates in Sitefinity is just combining a master page and a theme from Visual Studio and uploading them to our product.
- Creating modules and plugging them into Sitefinity CMS is easy. For more info on making modules you can review this link.
- Sitefinity’s UI has been designed with a focus on users. You can see our live demo site.
- The Sitefinity CMS was built using the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, so you can use all of the tools inside your Sitefinity project.
- Sitefinity CMS is built following closely ASP. NET concept and is easy to understand and develop on for .NET developers.
Answer
Full disclosure: I work for Telerik and, as others have noted, Telerik RadControls are also included DNN. We love the DNN community and regardless of which path you choose, we want to help.
Consequently, I don't want to compare Sitefinity to DNN. Instead, I will simply list below Sitefinity's strengths, from my perspective. These strengths might also be shared by DNN.
Extreme focus on end-user empowerment
At the end of the day, a CMS is not intended for developers. This might be an unpopular statement on this web site, but it is true.
Developers understand the underlying technologies and, thus, do not require a CMS. A CMS enables end-users (people without HTML & programming skills) to engage with the web site. If a CMS fails at this primary task, then it has failed entirely.
This mindset is woven heavily into Sitefinity. The entire admin-interface is oriented around drag & drop widgets. End-users can also make layout changes, build forms, create search indices, etc. using a friendly UI.
Built on common ASP.NET technologies
Although we strongly emphasize end-user empowerment, developer empowerment is equally important. Sitefinity cannot address every niche requirement. We wanted .NET developers to be capable of easily adapting the CMS to address requirements that are specific to their project.
To do this we stuck close to technologies that most .NET developers already understand:
- Sitefinity templates are simply ASP.NET Master Pages
- Sitefinity themes are simply ASP.NET Themes
- Sitefinity widgets are simply ASP.NET controls
I've seen others comment that Sitefinity isn't ASP.NET MVC-based, but this misses the point. Our goal is to help end-users and developers be immediately productive without requiring them to learn new skills. ASP.NET MVC is very promising, but its real-world adoption remains very low. In addition some of the end-user friendly features (like drag & drop widgets) would be difficult to recreate in an MVC environment.
With Sitefinity 4.0 we tried to adopt some of the strengths of MVC:
- We're using the MVC routing engine. URLs are extensionless by default and you have complete control over the URLs that are applied to your web pages.
- Everything is template driven and these templates are under your control. This gives you full control over the markup.
- ViewState can be completely disabled for pages using the CMS.
- All CMS data is exposed through fully RESTful services.
We'll continually watch MVC (Telerik has an MVC product) and adapt with the broader community.
Includes Telerik Developer tools
Telerik recently released an SDK for Sitefinity 4.0. This SDK is designed to help developers create add-on's for Sitefinity 4.0. It also includes:
- Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX
- Telerik RadControls for Silverlight
- Telerik OpenAccess ORM
These tools come included with Sitefintiy and can be used to create add-on's. These add-on's can then be posted to our marketplace. The marketplace can be browsed through Sitefinity and add-on's can be installed (or uninstalled) through the Sitefinity UI.
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We have so much more planned. The Sitefinity 4.0 BETA is freely available on the Telerik web site. Download it and compare for yourself.