I build sites and apps in .NET C# with MS SQL Server. I don’t really do that much that involves content management, but this has come up recently and so I’ve looked into this more deeply.
I just can’t find an awful lot of useful software. I did, in a moment of madness, believe it might actually be possible to get Joomla or Wordpress to work properly on an MS box more quickly than writing something myself, but this has proven futile. I doubt it’s actually completely impossible, but demands more time than I have to give, I would rather invest that time in writing my own. I also don’t want clients asking me why “MySQL has gone away” since why it “goes away” is a mystery to me. I guess that means it crashes, since restarting it brings it back again.
What I really need is some enterprise or at least decent quality bit of kit, free or otherwise, though it isn’t fundamental enough to my clients to spend thousands of pounds on. All instances would be for corporates/larger SMEs and all would need to run as sub-domains of the clients URL. All clients are on dedicated boxes, it must work with MS SQL, and not be littered with inline SQL code just begging for injection attacks. (That’s the bit that most worries me so I’d be encouraged to find one which uses SPs and doesn’t expect dbo level access, or which when locked down properly doesn’t break everything)
The primary purpose would be for writing news articles and there is a logical division or separation between the “news” and the “rest of the site” or “the app” though it must be able to be completely themed/templated to look like the client’s site and have a backend UI which clients won’t need days and days of training to understand and get up and running at a basic level of productivity.
Glad to hear it’s going well! Once I got a handle on how the page definition types interact with the templates and macros I was able to do some very cool stuff.
I haven’t heard from the client that I did the job for in a month and they’ve been updating regularly. That’s a good sign!
Thanks so much - I had given up for the night frustrated with Wordpress but your reply came in quickly, I set the Web Platform Installer running with Umbraco, finished the install this morning + configured and it’s running now. Real point and click stuff, just type in a few values, and in ten minutes I got to where I’d previously spent literally days trying to get to with the PHP/MySql based ones.
(Don’t get me wrong, I code Html by hand mostly, not really a plug and play type approach but I lose the point of the free open source stuff if you spend three days trying to actually get it to work!)
One of the clients has been let loose on it to play with Umbraco and see how they get on, must admit it does look very slick compared to Joomla.
For a free solution, take a look at Umbraco. I recently did a site built on that platform. It takes a little bit to figure out how things work, but once I did the site came together very fast. In addition, I was able to easily write my own user controls and add them to the pages where I wanted. I found a tut on NetTuts+ that helped me get going.
If you want to spend some money, you can take a look at Telerik Sitefinity or Kentico. Both of those are very strong, but also come with a price tag.
