Umbraco Rocks!!!

Since long I was thinking of writhing this post. I have been blogging since 2007 at blog.PBDesk.com powered by Google Blogger. But blogs have there own limitations, I was looking for my own full website wherein I can do whatever I want.  Being a .Net developer, initially i started writing whole website from scratch using ASP.Net, but that was taking up big deal of time. Lot of things to do - creating UI, business, framework, data access components and many more things....

So then I started looking for some open source CMS frameworks, which I can use as base for my website and build all my imaginations over it. In this way I can get some basic functionalities (basic framework and data access components) ready available. when I googled for "Opensource CMS", i found many of them in the ocean. Shortlisted few of them based on their popularity: Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke, MojoPortal, Kooboo, Umbraco, N2CMS, Moodle, Kentico. (Has anybody ever wondered why open source CMS systems have typical fuzzy names like this?)

Joomla & Drupal are really excellent and very powerful CMS systems build on PHP platform. I did installed both of them to have my hands-off with them. They were much easy to use. Community support was also great. But when time come to customize some component or write new component ... I failed... I am not a PHP guy. Though PHP is easy, but still it had a learning curve for me. Being a .Net developer and architect I was looking for something under .Net umbrella.

Before I proceed with CMS build on ASP.Net, i would like to talk about Moodle - Excellent Learning & Content Management System (LCMS). But again its build on PHP.  Moodle is the perfect LCMS i was looking for my dream website. Sill some corner of my heart is soft for Moodle and thinking to build an LCMS on it in future.

Finally, being a .Net guy, I was looking for a CMS system build on ASP.Net so that I can leverage all my knowledge of .Net. DotNetNuke, MojoPortal, Kooboo, Umbraco are some of the great CMS build on ASP.Net. Below are the few links you can use to compare and contrast these CMSs.

• Comparative list of CMSs
• .NET CMS Review: Kooboo, Umbraco, and MojoPortal
• Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) in C#
• Compare Content Management Systems
• A Quick Review of the 7 ASP.NET CMS

After researching a lot, I finally decided to use Umbraco[Link] for my website www.PBDesk.com. Though it involved a steep learning curve, i was impressed by its flexibility. Easy to create and add any components in .Net. This was the best thing I liked with Umbraco, I can create pages(.aspx) and user controls (.ascx) in ASP.Net/Visual Studio and integrate them with umbraco site easily. XSLT based macros and support for Razor syntax are excellent features of Umbraco. They claim about more them 85000 installations of Umbraco, including the very official website for ASP.Net (www.asp.net).

Currently I am building my website www.PBDesk.com using Umbraco 4.6.1 for .Net 4.0 & SQL Server 2008 database. This way  I got a basic framework for my website as well as if required I can develop any components in .Net and integrate them easily. Umbraco was able to satisfy a "developer" within me.

I took lot of time to decide the base CMS for my website, almost 9 to 10 months. During this time I installed and reviewed following CMS: MojoPortal, Joomla, Drupal, Moodle, Kooboo, Umbraco. All are great with their own pros and cons. My fishbone diagram made me decide upon for "Umbraco".   I am happy now and I have already build few pages for my website www.PBDesk.com. Umbraco Rocks!!!