Umbraco alternative?

1
votes

I've been trying to learn how develop websites with ASP.NET as well as setup a personal website to use as a online porfolio/resume. With my website I've decided to not try to reinvent the wheel and thus decided to use a premade ASP.NET based CMS.

After reading a lot of reviews I settled on Umbraco, but now I'm seeking out alternatives. I like Umbraco a lot but I keep running into problems. Since installing it on my host I haven't made any changes through the file system, or database directly. All changes have been through the admin site. Yet somehow I kept getting it into some state where I could not delete a datatype, and now I'm having problems removing or renaming one of my templates. I've searched for Umbraco forums for solutions and usually find that I have to run some SQL script workaround on the database to clean things up. This kind of thing is really not something I want to fiddle with for my personal site.

Has anyone else had a lot of problems with Umbraco like I have? Are there other free CMS systems out there that are more reliable, yet similar to Umbraco? Specifically I really like how Umbraco gives me total control over the HTML generated by my site. Simple is also better in this case. I'm not trying to create some kind social network/community portal/forum/blog site. There won't be multiple people logging onto this site or anything like that.

I've been reading a bit about N2, which I'm now starting to consider. I like that it's more developer based and that you setup page types through real .NET classes in Visual Studio. Again I don't want to attempt to build my own CMS from scratch, but at the same time I really don't like how hard it is to see what's going on under the hood with most other CMS systems.

3
asp.netcontent-management-systemumbracon2n2cms
Hi, Sorry to hear you're having problems with Umbraco. I can honestly say I've not seen the problems you are running into before. However there has been changes to the database recently, putting in more Foreign Key constraints etc that sometimes will not allow you to delete things with an ambiguous error. For instance when deleting doctypes and templates you need to ensure that the template is not referenced by a doc type or vice versa as this can cause constraint issues. If you post a bit more detail on the problems or links to the forum posts I may be able to help you. – Tim

3 Answers

6
votes

I haven't used N2 so I can't comment on that, but alternatives you can consider are Orchard or FunnelWeb, both are on MVC 3 and Razor.

If you're wanting a blog that is mostly just a blog then FunnelWeb is a good option.

I'm currently writing a comparison between Orchard and Umbraco if you're interested as well.

4
votes

I think you'll be happy you stuck with Umbraco. I was so frustrated with Umbraco when I first started working with it for the exact reasons you stated above. The issue with not being able to delete data types could mean that it's connected to something (IE: document or media type) somewhere and if you force delete it (IE: via the db) you could really mess up your install. <- speaking from experience.

I'm absolutely in love with Umbraco now though. I am completely confident that I can build just about anything I need with it now.

I think that my best piece of advice I can pull from my own experience is make sure that you've got your site architecture planned out thoroughly before starting to build it out in Umbraco. You don't want to be fiddling around in there afterward changing things and that's where you can really get yourself into some hot water.

Have fun!

0
votes

if you want a minimal .net mvc4 cms with good performance check out puck https://bitbucket.org/yohsii/puck/overview

it adds very few concepts on top of what you need to know for .net mvc but it does require .net4.5 (and therefore VS2012) to work with.

it also uses localdb out of the box but if you don't want to install that just attach the database mdf file to regular sql server and change the connection string