I have never used DotNetNuke before. I'm thinking about giving it a try to help me build websites, and I'd like to hear from other developers who are in a position to compare DotNetNuke with other CMS's/Web Application Frameworks.
I have used both DNN and Drupal to build fairly large, content-based sites. My focus is more on the production side... UI/themeing, module configuration, etc. I'm sold on Drupal, but there may be other choices that meet your needs just as well. I just happened to work with both systems in recent months.
Drupal's core taxonomy module gives you the benefit of creating a relationship between different kinds of content. If you have "article" and "video" content types, you can easily display data from both types based on the shared taxonomy terms. This is huge and something DNN lacks.
Drupal's hook system is also a big benefit when building your own modules or creating "sub-modules" to alter or add to the default functionality of an existing module. This allows you to customize functionality or take advantage of another module's functionality as your application runs. If you purchase a module for DNN, you will have to alter the module if it doesn't meet your needs. Once you do this, you will need to update it each time there's a new release that you would like to take advantage of. DNN modules seem to be more stand-alone solutions. For example, if a DNN module has a rating system, it's only a part of that solution. With Drupal, I can use the "5 Star" rating module in my forums, my blogs, my articles, my videos, etc. There's central configuration for it and I only theme it once.
The themeing layer in Drupal also gives you a large amount of flexibility in that process. My frustration with themeing DNN sites was that I was stuck working with the markup the developer used, with no option for altering the output without hacking the module. With theme hooks and function overrides, I can change the output from those modules to meet my needs (not completely sometimes, but enough), without touching the module code itself.
The biggest problem I had with DNN modules, including some of the most popular, was just a lack of documentation or discussions available for how to achieve your goal. While Drupal's forums can be hard to navigate and you might not always find the answer you are looking for, there are many outlets for gathering information. Honestly, using DNN made me appreciate the community approach of Drupal more.
I was left feeling that DNN would be fine for building sites with more basic needs. But for that, I would still choose something like WordPress or Joomla, considering they have much larger user bases and, in my opinion, are more sophisticated.
Hope this helps you some.
DNN is a pretty good .NET solution for CMS. If you want more flexibility, I would look at SiteFinity for .NET CMS systems. This is a very flexible and elegant CMS for .NET
If you venture out of .NET and want to look at PHP solutions, then DRUPAL, JOOMLA, and WORDPRESS are best solutions. Some comments about each:
WORDPRESS - Is the simplest and most elegant CMS to work with. Originally a blogging software, it has a super-easy user interface, although that also reads as more limited power and features. It's excellent for content driven websites and templates are easily built.
DRUPAL - Is very flexible and configurable, but I find it more complicated than the others. The Admin interface requires more programming knowledge to pull off and adding components and extras is a little more complicated. But, DRUPAL has been proven in the business and government world as a secure and reliable CMS.
JOOMLA - Is my personal favorite. It is also very powerful and I prefer the Admin. interface. Joomla allows for much flexibility and has the most user created modules and plug-ins out there. You have to invent near nothing with this one. I am biased in favor of Joomla, because I use it the most. That said, it has limiting factors against DRUPAL, such as user security features. But this is being fixed in the next upgrade.
Hope that helps as well.
I have development experience using both DNN and Drupal to build content-rich websites. My preference is Drupal for a number of reasons:
Development time-line was shorter; I was able to produce more in less time.
Drupal has a larger and more active developer community. More resources are available to aid in development.
DNN is not actually a CMS. It is only a framework; Drupal is a framework with a foundational CMS.
Drupal is easier to install.
DNN modules cost money; Drupal modules are free.
Actually, I put together some notes a while back when trying to understand the architectural differences between DNN and Drupal. Found those notes, they are here: DNN versus Drupal. Hope this is helpful.
I experienced a fairly high degree of frustration when working with DNN and I don't believe I am alone in that regard. About a year ago, ASPdotnetStoreFront abandoned their involvement with DNN calling it a "disaster to work with".
I am curious to know what piqued your interest in DNN and if you have a specific website project in mind. Regardless, I wish you success and I hope this helps.
I worked in a .NET development shop utilizing Kentico CMS. I agree, it is feature rich and stable. The API and DB are documented well. Overall, it is a great CMS. There is a limited free version: http://www.kentico.com/freecms.aspx
I'm testing out DNN right now. So far, so good, but I think it depends a lot on what you are using it for. I've only been looking at it for 3 days, but so far I do find the documentation lacking or outdated.
I evaluated many of the different Portal/CMS systems out there back in 2004 and DotNetNuke ended up being my choice and I've been very pleased with it, for everything but E-Commerce, ever since. DotNetNuke is endlessly extensible, easy to skin, easy for non-technical folks to update, has a great 3rd party eco-system, and the development team is very active and talented. There isn't a great Articles module in the core but there are several really good ones available from 3rd parties for a reasonable price.
I tried using Joomla a few years ago and hated it. Wordpress is good for a blog style site but doesn't have nearly the power or flexibility of something like DNN. I am intrigued by SiteFinity, Umbraco, and Kentico for sites where all that's really needed is a CMS, but not enough that I've bothered trying them over DNN.
Another good .NET solution - from what I've read - is Umbraco.
Take a look at Kentico CMS. It's commercial, but still affordable. In my experience from dozens of projects on both CMS, Kentico is much more feature-rich, stable and well documented.
Related
Is there any case that creating your own CMS for a specialized website more advantageous than using a prebuilt CMS such as dotnetnuke or umbraco? Can anyone site a project when they had to create a custom CMS and not used a prebuilt CMS? Where to draw the line from using a prebuilt CMS to a customize CMS? Or is using prebuilt CMS always more advantageous than building your own CMS in any type of content driven website?
With the quality and variety of current open source offerings, I would say it's almost never a good idea to start from scratch. It really comes down to requirements and features. There's a huge variety in the features and user experience of different systems out there. You really need to figure out the priorities (performance vs. ease of use vs. flexibility vs. extensibility vs. SEO) to choose the right one.
I generally go with DotNetNuke with an assortment of custom modules to enhance aspects of its CMS and SEO capabilities. There's just not much you can't do with DNN once you really get to know it. But if performance is your highest priority, another option might be preferred.
I think it depends what the overall goal of the project is. If you are building a marketing website or your project can be easily accomplished with a pre-built CMS then you should certainly start there and build modules or customize a little if needed.
However, if you are building a web application that's core functionality is not just content, page management you have to consider going a custom route. Pintrest, Facebook, Flickr, etc. would definitely not start with a pre-fab CMS.
The Onion started with Drupal at one point but realized their needs were so custom that they ended up doing it all in Python/Django. Plus, with frameworks like Python/Django and Ruby on Rails if you are building web apps you can easily create the CMS features you need.
We do a lot of DotNetNuke, some Drupal and all of our custom web apps we are doing with Ruby on Rails. Once you have the requirements and goals of the project you have to look at your tools and see what is the best for the job. And sometimes it's making your own tools :]
if you move for a prebuilt CMS, you have to use their available functions and do improve whatever your features. but if you go fro a new custom CMS, you are free to customized to the maximum.
What are your requirements? If the majority of your requirements (65% +) are CMS related requirements, than I would strongly recommend looking into existing CMS solutions (opensource or commercial).
On other hand, if your CMS requirements are about 35% of your total requirements, then I would consider implementing in-house, fairly light-weight CMS.
Be aware, CMS sounds like an interesting and easy to tackle task, but when it comes to it, it is likely to be the most complicated project that you have ever worked on, mainly due to its extensibility, security and efficiency related requirements.
It all depends on what the requirements are for the project.
I would like to know if it is possible to integrate zen cart to Drupal 7+ ?
I know that there was a Drupal zen cart integration project http://drupal.org/project/zencart
but it seems only support in Drupal 5.x
thx!
I'm afraid it's very unlikely, efforts for e-commerce in Drupal 7 have been very firmly moved into the Commerce module which is still a wee bit unstable and without a full complement of add-ons as yet.
There's also the Ubercart module which as it happens I'm grappling with myself at the moment. It's fairly complete but be prepared to get stuck in and do some coding if you want it to do anything that's not 'out-of-the-box'.
Drupal is great as long as it is not fully ecommerce. If the site has content plus little bit of selling, then drupal is OK. If you are serious about online shopping for your site, then magneto or a paid software might be a solution.
Magneto is not totally free, the free one is not easy and it is slow.
I have experienced zencart and it is OK if you are going to use it as the main cart integrated with forum or content management systems, the integration is not always easy. zencart is badly designed for a framework point of view, examples, inserting inline css in the template doesn't allow flexibility in overriding especially if the markup output is the result of a module.
I would generally prefer to use drupal for CMS/social network, zencart for online shop, phpbb for forums.
I chose zencart because I am an experienced web developer and I can work around badly designed table-based module output. The main templates are easy to edit. check http://domainpiranha.com/customizezencart.
It is the case in all CMS framework that you have to deal with them the way they are. If you are willing to extensively customize, then programming your own software might be easier.
Should I avoid using a CMS if I want to be able to quickly make good sites with more features/options to customize than Wordpress?
I want to become a better webdeveloper and able to quickly make good, fast, secure websites with lots of functionality without being limited so as I'd be with Wordpress. I don't see writing lots of plug-ins to reach the same functionality as a nice solution for doing my own programming.
I have written a few games, quizzes and other scripts I'd like to be able to recycle or easily adapt to work with the CMS.
I currently have a multi-lingual website that works with a /nl/ and /en/ part, that has a few self-written games I wrote in PHP.
CakePHP has a very good CMS called Croogo. It's still quite a young project (still in beta and being actively developed), but the great thing about it is that its a Cake app so it's coded to the well-documented Cake standards.
Whereas customizing/extending Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal et al would mean you'd have to invest a huge amount of time learning about their respective frameworks, all for the sake of one part of any given website (the CMS), if you learn CakePHP, you're learning a much more advanced and flexible framework that can pretty much be used to do anything well beyond the confines of CMSes.
If you learn Cake (or if you already know Cake) you'll find that you already understand Croogo without having to invest much additional time at all. Code you write in Cake can easily be packaged to be a Croogo plugin and even if Croogo doesn't stay around for the long term (I hope it will!), it wouldn't be difficult to re-factor all the plugins you've written to work in any other Cake-based CMS that comes along in the future, or even your own Cake apps.
Croogo is pretty basic, but quite powerful. It has a Wordpress-like feel to it, it supports nice URLs via an amazing reverse-routing system, the /en/ /nl/ language thing you mentioned works out of the box and it's very easy to get any of the huge array of Cake components and plugins working in harmony with the CMS through the use of hooks.
I'm currently working on a project using joomla and there are a ton of custom features that I need to implement. I usually have to create a plugin or module in that case. It's a pain. I'd much prefer doing most of this from scratch instead of hacking at the code. If I had a choice, I would not use a CMS. I hate them.
I think ultimately it's about long term support. When you build a custom CMS in cake or another framework it is much easier and faster for you to customize and build the way you wan too. This works great if this is a project you are planning on supporting (by this I mean bug/user support for when you unleash this CMS on non devs). This can become a headache pretty fast when things need updates and clients are looking for fixes and changes. It's completely manageable, just more of a headache then something with community support.
That being said, if you are comfortable in wordpress the amount of support that exists in that community is huge. So often times you can leave the project knowing updates for the CMS and plugins will come in at a regular speed.
TLDR So if it's a project you know you will be supporting long term (or people with the same comfort and skill level as you) then I would say build it your self for ease of build and customization. If this is a one off or something you plan on handing off to a client with little to no support, building inside of a community supported platform is best.
I really comes down to priorities, if you what to build a site really fast a CSM is hard to beat, but you do not have the same control over the core as you do when you wright it from scratch.
But you can do most any thing with plugins/modules so the control is there if you are willing to work for it. If you wright it your self you will be the only set of eyes most of the time so it will in most cases be slower to implement new standers and security fix's (because you will need to find them first) but with a CMS you will have many people working to make it better and safe at the same time.
If you want to be well rounded I think youe need to be able to do both, you can't control what the customer wants to use some times.
You can make site very quickly with a CMS like Joomla but the problem is even having over 7000 extensions sometimes for your particular purpose you don't find an extension and developing an extension can be real tough. it requires a comprehensive knowledge of Framework. If all you need to do is manage content CMS is the best choice. If it is like a web app and require more interactions go for some framework which provide the basic skeleton of your app. e.g. for CRUD operation many frameworks provide scaffolding feature and make this thing a piece of cake. CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Kohana are some of the best PHP frameworks you can use.
Using Chinese Cms DedeCms or phpcms And developer it more easily !
I like PHPCMS, it works with nginx, fasctcgi, mysql on linux or windows.
I use it to make portal site or enterprise sites group. The multi-site architecture and PHPSSO works well. Template engine is also strong enough.
take a look at big mysite: xinm123.com
Most important thing: it's open source.
I was trying to learn a little about JAVA frameworks like Spring. I hit view source on springsource.com and it's totally Drupal (a PHP CMS).
What's up with that? You would think they would build the site in their own framework, huh?
Because Drupal's more geared to a site of that nature, as it's a content management system instead of an application framework. It has modules for just about everything they wanted to do.
As Colin says on this page:
We have a very finite amount of resources which are frankly better spent on enhancing parts of Spring that are of use to the largest audience, not on modifying or implementing a CMS. While we did have to spend a decent amount of time tweaking the theme to our satisfaction, and inputing the old content, equivalent or more effort of this type would have been requiered with any solution. On the other hand, Drupal out of the box comes with all the functionality we need, so we didn't have to spend any of those scarce resources on development or customization of the product itself. It's that simple.
I think they figured that there was more value in servicing clients than writing a CMS for their web site. Springsource was (is?) a small company that cared about billable hours. I think going with this software was a good business move.
Or maybe other OS cms?
I want to form a members website, with registration, member profile and member personal photo galleries
What would you suggest? I'm pretty advanced with PHP just don't have the time to develop from scratch
I don't know much about Drupal but if you're using Joomla you may need to install something like Community Builder and/or Simple ACL. Joomla's default user management isn't great.
Drupal does what you are asking from a basic install with quite a degree of fine grained control over members, profiles, permissions etc. I have set several up with little or no extra modules, plugins or programming.
I actually run one site with several hundred members with not problems. I am not saying you cannot do this with Joomla, just have not had the experience. I think Drupal may well be more "community" oriented in this respect.
I vote for Drupal. Even Obama has voted for Drupal.
Joomla and Community Builder / JomSocial should be a nice pair.
In my experience, Drupal is far more flexible than Joomla. If you're comfortable with PHP, I'd recommend picking it.
Definitely Drupal, especially if you already know advanced PHP.
Nobody has great user features out of the box, but Drupal has more and better quality user-related modules.
Look at drupalmodules.com for 'user' modules in the 6.x versions, and you'll see tons of related modules for each one you check out.
There are modules for advanced profiles, for a percentage (of the profile) completed, user badges to make them feel special, imagecache for excellent image support, image upload with cropping, ckk and views can setup many different kinds of photo galleries from scratch so they are completely customized for your site, ubercart if you want to sell premium memberships, etc.
I think both Drupal and Joomla would be able to handle creating a basic version of what you describe. The turning point is going to be, what more you want to do.
One of Drupal's strengths is first truely uncovered when you develop. You can very easily customize the look and feel of your Drupal site. You'll have more fine grained control of both what it does and what how it outputs it's markup etc. It's a powerful tool, only downside is that it can be a bit hard to understand for normal people. But knowing PHP that shouldn't be a hindrance to you.
I already created 2 Drupal Sites and 1 Joomla Site with this Feature.
Since I've worked with Joomla some years too, I think I can give you some Hints on it:
Drupal is WAY more flexible and professional than Joomla. But you have to put some effort into it. But if you know how to use it, it will do what you want. And since Drupal itself is so flexible the core does handle almost every feature you need. So it is possible to mix a lot of features together and do things nobody has thinked of before.
If you use Joomla, you have to pick a module for this task (like CommunityBuilder http://www.joomlapolis.com/) and while this module is very powerful, it may work together with other modules, but likely it will not.