I have explored some of the features of LifeRay from past few months. But due to high on hardware and development resource I would not want to go with LifeRay. Is there any good alternative to liferay in asp.net c#. I have seen following CMS application similar to LifeRay. Just want to know if someone has used it.
AxCMS.Net
Umbraco CMS
DotNetNuke
Thanks,
Piyush
We've been throwing around a few of those terms in our office and nearly settled for Umbraco. I think we were satisfied with it but in the end decided to go towards Drupal because of it's wider user-base and support.
Related
I'm just looking for some advice really on CMS choice. The website will need some kind of CMS for sure, because the requirement is that the end user is able to add multiple "project case studies" under a bunch of different categories, and also spawn separate pages, and change general bits of content around the site. It's quite simple really, but the site needs to be easily navigated where these case studies are loaded via AJAX requests.
I'm looking closely at Orchard, a .NET CMS based on MVC2, but it seems kinda like overkill for the project - it has a bunch of features I'd never be using on the website and I don't want to overdo it. Plus, it's still a little bit buggy because debug messages keep coming up looking for debug classes that don't exit.
Any advice would be awesome!
Thanks!
No matter what CMS you choose, it's likely to have stuff you don't need, as a CMS is necessarily casting its net very wide. It is supposed, after all, to be able to manage any kind of content.
I'd like to understand what you mean by "debug messages keep coming up looking for debug classes that don't exist". Can you elaborate, maybe on a PM so I can understand if that is a real bug that we should fix.
When it comes to opensource .net cms, I had very good experience with N2 CMS. You can check it out on GitHub: https://github.com/n2cms/n2cms
There was a discussion recently, regarding whether to use Umbraco or Orchard as a backend for ASP.NET webstie/application. You could try reading this, I guess you'd find a solution there.
I am thinking of learning a CMS. I am not sure which one will be the best to learn.
I seen quite a few job posting asking for a website with CMS capabilities(so it seems something that would be good to know).
CMS on the surface seem to be easy to use but in my mind this seems to quickly change when I start thinking of sites that need more then just out of the box functionality.
For instance sites that need custom themes. How do you switch out themes with your own layouts? Or what happens if a page on your website needs to have custom logic and cms editing on the same page.
Like say you need to write something that pulls up data from a db and format it on the page but to the right of this data you have a paragraph that an admin should be able to edit through the CMS.
So how do you have this work? How do you add say the gridview server control to this page?
So I guess what I am getting up I looking for a CMS that has good documentation on how to do custom logic on pages and not just a CMS where if your not using there own themes and try to add your custom logic on a page you basically have go through the CMS and change the entire source code.
I like using asp.net mvc but as far as I can really see there is really only one CMS that is built on MVC and that is Orchard but it's still in beta and always changing. So I don't want to invest time to learn on how how to use it and then they make changes and your back to square one.
Thanks
It seems like you have 2 competing concerns: 1) which CMS might be best to learn for "professional" opportunities, and 2) which CMS might be best to learn for staying with relevant/interesting technologies like MVC.
For the first concern, a lot of that depends on how long a particular CMS has been around. For example, DotNetNuke has been around for many year, is well-established, and many use it to build commercial CMS solutions. It is web forms based. There are many other well-established CMS out there. For example, the Web Platform Installer from Microsoft, gives options to install WordPress.
For the second concern, I would recommend Orchard. Yes, it is in beta but it has been in development for a while now and is really getting better stability. Even if there are changes from here, I'd expect them to be minor and not sweeping changes to force to you learn a brand new paradigm. As you pointed out, it is also MVC-based. This let's you do development in a much more friendly way - and without having to jump through a bunch of hoops.
My friend used .Net Nuke to create a CMS.
http://www.dotnetnuke.com/
It was his final project in school and they still use it.
http://www.garneau-tennis.com/
The obvious advantage is that you can develop in .Net.
Check it out if nothing else.
N2 CMS would seem to fit all your requirements:
http://n2cms.com/
http://n2cms.codeplex.com/
I've created two CMS sites recently using this. It is probably the best developed CMS around although there is a learning curve. It also has an ASP.NET MVC version :-)
Several themes come with it out of the box. I have already built two custom themes myself and it was pretty painless.
Dot Net Nuke - Well established and using the MVP pattern to ease WebForms development / testing.
Umbraco - Another well known (ran on asp.net) and they are working on an MVC version.
Orchard - New, very new but all MVC. I think this will be a winner as it matures. It's not necessarily bad to get in early. Even as things change you will be able to pick them up and when Orchard hits the prime time you will already know it while all the others waited for it to get out of beta. :-)
I have a friend of mine who owns his own software consulting business. Most of the stuff his employees work on is .NET related development. He's been out of actual development for many years, and has been focused on building his business. He asked me the best way to get familiar with the whole .NET platform and development under .NET. Is anyone aware of a video training series, or something similar, that's designed to get someone up to speed on all aspects of .NET?
This is the obligatory "port another project into .NET" answer.
My guess is that he doesn't have to cover all of .NET, but a great way to get up to speed with both C# and a significant part of the .NET framework is the C# 4.0 in a Nutshell book. It assumes some programming experience and covers a lot of stuff.
In my opinion the first step is to read a book which covers different parts of .Net Framework. Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform is one possible book as it covers different technologies such as WPF, WCF, Linq, Ef, Asp.Net. They are not discussed in depth but is a good resource for getting familiar with current technology stack.
Also, I would recommend actually developing in .Net as is many knowledge comes from the actually doing it.
In addition to the other answers, maybe your friend could sit in on any code reviews, design sessions or even perform pair programming with the other developers once he gets a basic understanding of things on his own. I suppose this could be difficult in a consulting business vs. regular development shop though.
In addition to all of the books and blogs which will be mentioned, I always recommend people start learning with something practical.
When I'm teaching I make up simple exercises broken down into chunks like build a basic database, try simple things like displaying the data, filter the data using drop down, add auto postbacks and update panels, updating the data in the DB. It doesn't take long to get an overview of the basic concepts, techniques and tools when presented with examples. And then it's down to experimentation, imagination, and research!
Buy Visual Studio and an MSDN membership - in case its a startup there maybe various options to reduce this cost (Bizspark/Websitespark)
Go through common walkthroughs - areas to go through are Winforms, Asp.net, Asp.net Ajax in that order. Can go through WCF, Silverlight and other framework options later.
Search the web for 'Azure trial' - supposedly, there is a one month free pass available. Dont know if this is real, but if it is, take it and deploy simple applications on the cloud - learn what Windows Azure and Sql azure are all about. After a while can learn about Appfabric messaging platform as well.
After this, start deep-diving into any areas of the technology depending on project needs.
Channel 9
ASP.NET getting started
Dimecast
DNR TV
more than reading any book what made get started with .NET was doing projects. Start building a web site if you want to learn ASP.NET, you get to learn C# and VB as well like this. Just by reading a book each chapter would take lot of time. Initially you will do lot of mistakes and you will frequently get the dreaded yellow error page. The more mistakes you make, the merrier. My experience with .NET is limited to ASP.NET, C#,LINQ, web services, SQL Server 2008. But it took less than 20 days for me to get to know about all these stuff. Now I am trying to do WPF, WCF, Silverlight projects. IF I read any .NET book now, it wouldn't take much time for me to complete it.
I realy suggest to use a step by step teach your self book. They are good for beginners and have some practices maybe something from SAMS publishing like
Teach yourself c# in 21 days
hi I am planning to develop a site very similar to http://www.nextdaypets.com/ but with some more features...i have worked on JOOMLA n i know it pretty well. but there are few limitation like access level control and there is no component available for what i need. what i m confused about is that whether i should make that component in joomla or should i develop my own cms or should i take some .net based cms and write the component for it. I know C# and .net framework as a beginner. I just completed a certification course in .net last month and i don't know php but don't have issue in learning it...so what should i do...please suggest.
Well, as i understood , all you need to do is to adopt an open source CMS (joomla or drupal) and customise it. If you know a bit of php it will take you a day of expirementing to get familiar with making components & modules for joomla /drupal. Majority of the work you can do by customising the existing stuff and using third party open source components available already. The remaining small delta amount of work, you can code yourself.IF won't be that tough i can assure.
Developing a CMS of your own might not b a good option, as it takes a lot of effort to get a stable one with all features, currently being offered.
Also , if you have a doubt about the platform, i would suggest to stick on to open source platform, rather than Commercial one. The large number of OSComponents available as well as the large community support are factors defenitly you should consider.
writing your own cms is lots of work, so you should consider this carefully. Extending an existing framework could save you a lot of time.
In your case I'd choose a cms which fits well to my purpose and uses a language I'm familar with. So if you like C#, then look for an ASP.NET based cms. Of course, if you like to learn PHP joomla would be a good choise.
Usually, when I have to pick a platform I consider a certain number of variables. For example, does your customer want an open-source or a commercial platform? Is it concerned with being dependent on you for future changes to the system? Does he have already a hosting provider? Will he host the website himself? These are all tech-questions that should be kept in consideration.
I would strongly advice against writing your own CMS. That's a lot of work, and even the best and most tested products hide some bugs. Relying on something that already exists out there, it will speed your development up, as it will allow you to focus on the specific functionalities, and not on the overall system or basic features (client-server architecture, caching, views resolving, itemization, etc. ...).
I've worked quite a lot with many CMS, and in this period my attention is focused mainly on Umbraco, a .NET-based open-source CMS that has many interesting features. I personally don't like Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc.
If you (or you customer) have money to spend and can afford a commercial platform, I would suggest you to take a look at Sharepoint or Sitecore; Sitecore is somewhat conceptually close to Umbraco, whereas Sharepoint is more extensive but there is more work to do to bring it up and running.
If you are looking for an e-commerce platform and PHP doesnt scare you, you could give a try to Magento.
I hope these few names can help you. I mentioned them because of my own personal experience and - to be honest - they are all good products...
Cheers,
Gianluca.
I've always worked with the standard Linux web stack (linux, apache, php, python, mysql) but have been given a great job opportunity working with a group that works with the Microsoft Web Stack (IIS, ASP.NET, MSSQL, C#).
There seems to be a pretty good Microsoft following here on SO. Where should I begin? Specific books, tutorials, online resources are appreciated.
ASP.NET MVC will probably seem more familiar to you than ASP.NET WebForms. And honestly, I think that most pro-shops are going to move towards it over the next 5 years.
There are some really good tutorials (the kind that WebForms still doesn't have) at this site.
http://www.asp.net/Learn/mvc/
MSSQL (other than some tweaks to syntax) and IIS will probably be less of a hurdle, unless you'll specifically be administering them. I'd focus on learning C# and ASP.NET.
A good resource for C# is the MSDN C# tutorials.
A good resource for ASP.NET is the ASP.NET Quickstart Site.
RampUp is Microsoft's intro learning site. There are learning paths based on the background of the developer (like you for a LAMP stack)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/rampup/default.aspx
Additionally, the Asp.Net site has a bunch of tutorials and videos
http://www.asp.net/learn/
The data access tutorials available here from the ASP.NET website are as good a place as any for the experienced IT professional to learn about SQL Server data access in ASP.NET.
Would recommend www.learnvisualstudio.net great for staters.
If books are your best learning source then some I found helpful:
Pro C#
Pro ASP.NET
CLR via C#
The third book is about the common language runtime (what executes compiled C# code).
ASP.Net has a few different approaches. There's inline coding (much like PHP and ASP Classic), code behind and MVC.
To start out I would just stick with inline coding. Working with ASP.Net controls and view states is pretty hairy at first so I'd get familiar with the syntax to start and then move on.
Lot of good web sites in this SO thread. I very much lke MSDN Virtual Labs. They have them on just about every technology in the stack and they let you get your hands on the technology and play around.
You should definitely read a good quality book, about C#, I would recommend a C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, Third Edition book, from O'Reilly.
Then you should look into some MS stack specific pages, as is the CodeProject (www.codeproject.com/) site.
At the end you should start read some interesting blogs, on technologies you will work with.
You definitely should not miss the following ones:
weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/
www.hanselman.com/blog/
haacked.com
That would be for a start. :)
(sorry for missing links, but SO say I am a new user, and I can post only one link. :( )
I would suggest you read C# in Depth by Jon Skeet, who is a user here at SO. It will definitely help you master C#. The rest is gravy.