ASP.Net CMS recommendation, Orchard, Sitefinity, Umbraco or N2? [closed]

Question

Over the past 3 years I have been using (...shamefully) SharePoint 2007, DNN and Tridion to develop web portals. I am however looking to move off SharePoint and Tridion (lack of control over urls, markup and tdd) and am looking for alternatives.

Which of these would your vote go to and why? Could you share any experiences you have with these?

• Orchard
• Sitefinity
• Umbraco
• N2

Although Orchard and Sitefinity seem easily extensible, I am worried about community support.

Thanks

Indeliberate

Answer 1

Orchard is being developed by the Microsoft team and being pushed by Scrott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman and others, so support should be no problem at this point. Orchard is being build on top of the new features of ASP.Net MVC 3 and so is state of the art. My vote would be on Orchard.

Caulis

'Although Microsoft is sponsoring this project by providing full-time development resources to the effort, the Orchard CMS is not officially supported through Microsoft.' -orchardproject.net/docs/frequently-asked-questions.ashx – Hendley

Which is funny because look at the team behind it: it's all Microsoft employees. orchardproject.net/about – Hendley

@Merritt: By now its only 2 of 5 members are from microsoft weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2012/01/30/… – Snyder

Why does Microsoft need to venture into the CMS arena? Orchard's poor usability and endless configurability is definately a hallmark Microsoft trait. – Etude

Answer 2

I have only tryed Umbraco, its easy to use for the customer, developer and there is a very good split between code and content so the customer will never have to see eny code.

Ascot

Answer 3

Because it wasn't mentioned here, I'd like to advocate for N2CMS. Though its documentation sometimes leaves a little to be desired, once you're up to speed, developing for it is like a fresh breath of air compared to some other CMS's. It's extensibility is far beyond what you would expect, though you sometimes have to dig into ILSpy to find the gems.

Support on the N2CMS forum is really up to par, thumbs up for the developer(s). It has also been around for some time right now, so you can call it pretty mature.

Upside - wich might also be a downside when trying to keep up - is that it's under pretty active development, meaning important bugs get smashed quite efficiently.

I must admit I have little experience with Orchard (looks like it's really a match on several aspects), and because of MS supporting it more or less, I think Orchard might win the game by sheer exposure :)

Raillery

Answer 4

We currently have all 3 setup, and I think Umbraco is currently the safest option and the most robust, as long as you are willing to integrate a URL rewriter (ain't no place for aspx extensions on public websites) Sharepoint is just the wrong tool for the job (unless you need a more developed change tracking system) and Orchard is just too new for me to recommend it to anyone that is hesitant to deploy bleeding edge technology. I have no experience with N2 and Sitefinity.

I have been using Orchard myself lately, mostly just to keep up with trends, and I am finding it to be a bit rough around the edges but promising and extensible, especially for a developer with ASP.NET MVC experience. Sub menus for navigation don't seem readily available out of the box, however this stackoverflow posting appears to provide a solution. Also, I loathe using Web Forms for a CMS, so that is mark against Umbraco (until they release version 5) and Sharepoint. system.

Hendley