Rankspike

CMS has been around for years, but it seems now, more and more businesses trying to get their feet wet on this  technology, the major benefit of Content Management is separation of duties, by this I mean , you can have IT working on the development of modules , and graphics department working on the images, buttons and color themes while marketing can help with creative copies and content. Once it’s deployed, it’s easy for Admin to assign content providers their own tasks so your IT can devote more time to more important projects.

CMS comes with different flavors that you can try , whether you’re working with PHP/MySQL or ASP.NET platform there is always a CMS package that’s right for you. Most importantly and I think you will agree with me here .. some of the great ones are FREE!!

Since this particular article is more concerned with ASP.NET platform , let’s sum up 3 most popular CMS for ASP.NET.

1. mojoPortal – mojoPortal CMS was created by Joe Audette, not only that this software has a lot of following, Joe provides an exceptional support, he answer’s any questions, issues , bugs that you may encounter along developing and deploying CMS. mojoPortal is also easy to change skins and themes. It provides plug in play modules that you can develop outside of the source box and import back to mojoPortal solution (sln) that you will surely be able to use in no time. The documentation is really clear and like I said if you have any questions just go to the forums and in less than an hour most of the time you’ll get an answer.

2. DNN – Top contender, DotNetNuke, bigger than mojoPortal has backing of Perpetual Motion Interactive Systems Inc, although they owned the copyright to this open source software, it does not make the code any less open (this is totally different topic) but suffice it to know that they are still open source and yes you have the sourcecode to play around with. This CMS package has a huge following and are supported by a lot of people in the open source community.

DNN is also a very powerful CMS platform, and gives you a lot of freedom in terms of extending your CMS in case you may feel deemed necessary. Skins and themes are available for sale in case you are in the crunch and wanted to concentrate more on features and deployment rather than design, or if you don’t have any graphics designer available to help you. Which mojoPortal lacks in that sense, compared to mojoPortal (mp) DNN comes with Enterprise and Community edition, they have their own support team in case you can’t figure out what the hek you’re doing, and of course forums and blogs are also available plus the documentation. Since it’s popular you can find a lot of tutorials on development, skinning and so forth by searhing on Google.

and the last but not the least ..

3.Umbraco – What can I say, I like this CMS but the only thing is that it doesn’t run on virtual machine , another sad thing about this CMS is the documentation it has a very poor one, not like it’s competitors from the abovementioned, tutorials are harder to find and does not provide too many support, this CMS only supports SQL so if you’re running different Database then you’re out of luck here.

So here are the summaries:

mojoPortal runs on .NET uses pure C# language, supports major Database system (SQL, MySQL, protege etc)

DNN runs on .NET uses VB.NET as a language but you can put C# modules in, you can buy skins and themes, runs supports major Databases.

Umbraco – runs on .NET uses pure C# language, only supports SQL.

Whatever you prefer, make sure that it fits your development schedule, time to deploy , complexities of providing extention modules and most of all good documentation and online support.