I need to implement a CMS for the school district I work for. The main requirements I have are flexibility, extensibility, and ease of use (for the content authors) and it needs to be on the ASP.net platform and oh, by the way, it needs to be free or very cheap. It's those last two requirements that keep hanging me up! There are many terriific open source CMS apps for the LAMP environment, but that is not an option for us. So far, DotNetNuke looks to be the product that comes closest to fitting the bill. The only other major contender I have found is Umbraco.
So here's the deal. I messed around with both Umbraco and DNN for a few days. As far as the core of what we will be doing -- authoring, updating, approving, and publishing articles and pages of content, Umbraco seems to be better suited and doesn't have a lot of unnesessary bells and whistles that "nuke" type portals have, including DNN. However, two major strikes against Umbraco for me are that the source is all in C# (I can learn it if I need to but that adds to the timeline) and more importantly, there is no where near the level of support and documentation and general community presence that DNN seems to have. That one scares me.
So, now I am looking deeper into DNN. Here is basically what I want to do. So far, the jury is out as to whether this can be done within a reasonable amount of time and effort.
- First and foremost, I have yet to find a module that gracefully handles the core of our work process. Am I overlooking something obvious? At least 75% of our site will be just pages of information and articles. We need to be able to establish a workflow that ensures that content is kept current and that only authorized users can create, edit, approve, and publish content. Is there a core module that is designbed with this in mind or will I need to find one and/or develop my own?
- I need a site that doesn't look "nukey". You know what I mean? Every site I have seen that is running on a nuke type portal seems to share the same basic "blocky" structure. Please understand, I am not being critical -- for a portal site, this seems to work well. I'm just asking how difficult it would be to develop a site based on DNN that flows more gracefully.
- We are concerned about standards, code validation, and usability. I noticed that the default installation of DNN ( as well as this site) does not validate. How big a hurdle is that going to be? I have not yet looked at the generated code, so I just need a general idea as to whether anyone else has tackled this issue and what their results have been.
DNN seems like a solid platform to me. It has many strengths. But before I spend a few weeks trying to get it to fit our requirements, I just wanted some general information to help me decide if it's worth the effort or not. Thanks for any help and comments any of you can provide.