Thread

After an emphatic “no” to installing PHP on the webserver, I will be looking for an CMS solution that will run on ASP.Net. :-( I’ve looked at Umbraco, Mojo Portal, Graffiti and Community Server, which I guess is made by the same people that make Graffiti.

Does anyone have any experience with any ASP.Net CMSs? Anything that compares to EE in terms of flexibility?

Any thoughts or insight is greatly appreciated. I hate that they won’t let me show them the power of EE. It’s quite frustrating!

That’s a tough one. I had a client who wasn’t keen on leaving their IIS host and Umbraco seemed like the best move at the time, but Graffiti caught my eye (wasn’t in the budget). We ended up not switching to use a CMS at all.

EE is pretty unique, if either one of those is as good as EE, let me know immediately. 😊

After an emphatic “no” to installing PHP on the webserver

Just out of curiosity, what were their arguments for going with ASP and not PHP?

Company policy? MS-only shop? Yes, those exist.

Pretty much what Ingmar says - I think they’re afraid of the open source-ness of PHP. They’re very much “If it comes from Microsoft, it must be good!” school of thought.

I won’t give up though! EE would be so perfect in its flexibility to give them what they’re looking for.

Try dotnetnuke.  It is one of the best open-source frameworks for ASP.NET.  I think it is actually sponsored by the big guy to promote ASP.NET technology.

One of the strong points of PHP is all the available applications which have been built for distribution with the language.  Outside of PHP I would strongly consider rolling my own solution.  For instance, with Ruby, there is nothing even close to ExpressionEngine and you simply have little (if any) choice than to custom code your needed functionality.  I don’t know what the state of ASP.NET is.

This is something that your clients must consider when picking a platform.  If they are against using open source software then they should have a decent budget to work with.  The other consideration would be time.  If they have flexibility with both, then I would start looking up .NET developers.

Looking at Kentico and DNN here, besides the ones mentioned above, a big project and I still don’t have the experience to put my best foot forward with EE.
This from the dotNetNuke skinning guide, it’s painful for me even to look at:

A project on a timeline, the programmer get’s the ball :(
How often is custom PHP code even required for EE, site development?

We went with DNN, I feel better about that than Kentico. DNN has a large community, but I’m pretty much lost already.
It’s one option considering what’s really out there, and if you must. They are threatening a version 5 it’s in beta 5 now, to be more CSS friendly. You can just override many skin settings, with some CSS applied logic to the Solpart menu or yada yada, it’s so over-complicated the whole compiling of the code bit.
On three I’ll lateral the ball, hut-hut-hut, lol.
Maybe it will work out, but dotNet makes no sense to a designer programmer-hack, or probably a php programmer.

I haven’t tried other ASP.NET CMS systems asides from DotNetNuke.. But if you do plan on going this route, and need a publishing system, head on over to Ventrian, the publishers of a module called “News Articles”, which will probably get you the closest to EE you can in terms of publishing.

I haven’t tried other ASP.NET CMS systems asides from DotNetNuke.. But if you do plan on going this route, and need a publishing system, head on over to Ventrian, the publishers of a module called “News Articles”, which will probably get you the closest to EE you can in terms of publishing.

Funny how even here on a PHP CMS you get solid expert advice, on a non-related product.
DNN the amount of people hawking modules and skins and templates, it’s subterfuge to an inferior product over there in DNN-land, lol. I’m stuck following the path of least resistance, on this one by the decision makers. EE will win the day in the end, down the road, I’ve got hunch 😉
Thanks for the Ventrian pick dimsum, it might help some considering…

Seriously - take a stand. PHP and MySQL can both be installed on Windows boxes. You have about 100% more options based on these technologies including many mature, widely used and secure CMS products.

If you can’t lead the cattle to water you could try Ubraco - an open source ASP.NET CMS that my mate who is a .NET developer says is about the best off the shelf offering.

I suspect the resounding NO was from a support point of view. If an enterprise size company does not use php on a regular basis it is unlikely to have the staff to be able to support it. It never as simple as sending someone on a course as there will be service level agreements between IT and the business and between different sections of IT to maintain the hardware. A company strategy will support certain platforms and staff will be hired and trained to fit that strategy to ensure best use of resource.

Meanwhile I suspect the best place to get good answers is on s forum of people who use .asp and .net rather then here where we are all hell bent EE and PHP junkies!