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I've been tasked with finding an open source CMS that can be integrated slowly into a set of existing websites. This way pages can be brought across to the CMS one by one with the site remaining live during the changeover.

Does anyone have any thoughts, experience or advice on what CMS solution would be suitable for solving the problem I've outlined above?

I've been trying out the various offerings for the last couple of days and have found the following options. But having very little experince of using a CMS it'd be really helpful to get other views on this from more experienced devs on what pit falls to avoid.

N2 CMS - A mature option, I've got this working but the documentation is really lacking. I've also found it difficult to find the minimum spec requirements for a database and also browser compatibility. I do however like the code structure for creating the template pages.

Phun CMS - this is a new open source project that I really like the look of in the way the programmer is approaching the problem and separating the concerns. It's probably far too new though to really look at at the moment.

Composite C1 - A mature CMS option, great documentation. However says that it only supports IE9+.

Umbraco - not tried yet but looks heavyweight

Piranha - not tried yet but nice website and documentation and also says that it's lightweight.

Neil
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4 Answers4

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I'm the lead developer for Piranha CMS so maybe I can shed some light on what Piranha CMS is best at!

Our focus is content management and to have a transparent and lightweight API for developers. Piranha CMS has almost no components or helpers that render any HTML at all, it simply provides a database, a manager interface and a routing mechanism for retrieving the correct data for the current request.

In the case of you having an existing website you could actually bypass the routing completely, add one page at a time in the manager interface and then manually load the Page model in you existing page. This would allow you to keep your original application exactly the same but manage the content form the manager interface.

Hope you find the CMS you're looking for, and if you have any questions about Piranha feel free to contact me!

Håkan Edling
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  • Looks promising Hakan! – Nicholas Petersen Oct 02 '13 at 16:58
  • We ended up going with Piranha and it's been great so far. Thanks for all the support Hakan! – Neil Oct 02 '13 at 20:28
  • Having been very disappointed in Orchard (learning curve is FAR too steep), Piranha is next on my list. It looks a lot closer to what we need. – Ben Power Oct 30 '13 at 06:57
  • @BenPower, I share that disappointment in Orchard, no harm intended. I wanted ASP.NET *MVC* because I like MVC and Razor pages and strongly typed models. Orchard makes you generate pages with their own complex model that parallels Drupal, problem is: I didn't want a Drupal like system for building pages when a far superior one exists for MVC developers: Razor code with strongly typed models! In WordPress, for custom themes you just use PHP, my hope for a MVC CMS is the same: customize with *raw Razor* code, just with hooks into the model (which can be strongly typed in MVC!). – Nicholas Petersen Nov 12 '13 at 20:09
  • I used Piranha in one of my clients projects. Only problem was, I had attempted to re-target the project at 4.0 as the clients server is Server 2003 and cant install .net 4.5. Mind you I had great success, with this project locally, it worked perfectly integrating it into existing controllers and views. And in that respect it is awesome! It even worked on in vs 2012 with the project re-targeted at .net 4.0. But blew up when attempting to run it on 2003 server. Håkan, would it be possible to generate a build targeted at 4.0? Turns out MS's "in place upgrade" to 4.5 actually breaks a few things. – Brandon Dec 30 '13 at 16:18
  • Well the project initially was built for 4.0 but was then upgraded to 4.5 so it "shouldn't" be an issue. I have even added a NET40 project configuration with a segment exluded. If you mail me some of your error logs I might be able to help you to fix the issues you're having if it's related to .NET 4.0 – Håkan Edling Dec 30 '13 at 16:34
  • That would be awesome, how can I get a hold of you outside of here? I don't see your email address or anything here or on the piranha website. – Brandon Dec 30 '13 at 22:32
  • You can send a mail to info [at] piranhacms.org – Håkan Edling Dec 31 '13 at 06:08
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Another option of a full featured ASP.NET CMS is Orchard. But like all full featured CMS, you are stuck with initial learning curve about the CMS. You are also stuck with using that CMS once you are converted to it, so do all your research and basic site feature development before making the decision on CMS because it will be difficult once you are converted.

Phun CMS approach is different. Realizing that everyone site is customized, except for small things that you allow client to modify and do not need to get called in the middle of the night to make that modification, Phun CMS was born. Modern framework such as ASP.NET MVC already has all the CMS features: authentication, routing, razor templating/theming, etc... Phun CMS just provide a way to store your client dynamic content. You can still utilize everything you already know about ASP.NET MVC and Razor. But I'm also the Phun CMS author, so maybe my comment is (a bit, just a bit ;) biased on this topic.

Noogen
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  • I've had a look at your library and I like where it's headed but I don't think it's mature enough yet for my project :( – Neil Apr 02 '13 at 15:15
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    So what did you finally decided on? Even if you have not, drop a message on my github when you do and what are the points of your decision. Thanks... – Noogen Apr 02 '13 at 23:17
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If you want to go page-by-page I'd advise a setup where the new CMS tries to match all requests, if no match is found, instead of throwing a 404, redirect to the old instance (which can in turn return a generic 404 if needed).

I don't think this kind of solution is specific to any CMS, but check if you are able to modify the 404 page behaviour (really, you should in any mature CMS).

Von Lion
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N2 CMS definitely fits the bill and it is particularly suited to integrating into an existing site bit-by-bit. It's lightweight and nice and responsive. It's also very developer friendly and doesn't force it's model on you.

The only problem is the one that you mention, that the documentation isn't the greatest so it's initially hard to get into. However, you'll find after that initial barrier it is very easy to get the hang of.

Co7e
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