I was recently in the market for a good CMS based on .net with my last employer. I was delightfully surprised to find Telerik's Sitefinity. Telerik has this slogan which I just really love, "Deliver more than expected!". Now that's the kind of driver I'm talking about. This is a company that actually stands behind their slogan, and continues to really drive innovation in the developer tools market. Don't get me wrong, they're not the only big fish in this area, but I really think they're leap from a controls only platform to a suave CMS, has really "kicked it up a notch" outdoing their competition.
Reasons you should look into this product:
* If you get a license, you get to use all of their awesome controls with it as well. So, really, the CMS is just an extra topping of goodness.
* Their pricing is extremely reasonable, especially for their offering, and the usage of their controls.
* They take a well thought out take on what a CMS really needs to be from a developer standpoint:
- Fit any design
- Be able to include custom user controls as modules
- Be able to program to a 1st class API
- Include the administration of your custom user controls in the same space as the CMS administration
- Expose the workflow engine to custom code
- Smart live site editing and manipulation
- Templated layouts
- The next version will have true content versioning (gasp, what a concept!) This has been missing from most affordable CMS systems since the beginning of time.
- Oh yeah! It's got the best UI i've ever seen for a CMS.
Now, it's not a perfect product, yet (There's still half a gallon of Kool Aid left in the jug) Things they need to fix or yet to release:
- It's still in asp.net 1.1, you can make it work in asp.net 2.0, but it's not optimized to use things such as master pages, which would really help when defining your template layouts. (Asp.net 2.0 release is coming out in June 2006)
- Availability of modules, there are several modules that they could offer right out of the box without too much effort and support, blogs, press releases, image gallery, etc. At it's current state, it's pretty much barebones, the custom modules they do offer are more as examples than actual production ready code.
- For some reason, they haven't pounded the marketing hammer on this product yet. It's not nearly as advertised as their Telerik Control Suite, but it all fairness, it's a relatively new product, and I'm sure they are wanting to get the asp.net 2.0 version out first.
So, if you're in a market for a CMS based on .net give me a shout, as I tested pretty much everything I could get my hands on, I can give you a heads up on competitors products.