CMS options in 2008: It’s still this bad?
Well, I’m back at it again…looking and researching Content Management software options. The last time I did this with any serious effort was about 5 years ago, where I had to endure endless talks with sales folks in an attempt to find out the real details of the products they were offering.
Granted, it does appear that the open source CMS market has matured nicely. There’s definitely a short list of quality products spanning a variety of back-end technologies to pick from. But in the commercial/enterprise realm, it still seems to be business as usual.
We have to shortlist our options (unfortunately) down to a Microsoft-centric product (we need a .net solution). Of the 4 or 5 commercial apps I’m curious about, a majority of them:
- Have no indication of pricing what-so-ever on their web sites
- Reply to any email with approximately 8mbs of PDF brochure attachments
Now, granted, I suppose the industry is still pretty much run by CMS sales folks selling shiny brochures to upper management but I am bummed that business model hasn’t changed in the past 5 years. More power to the Open Source folks, I guess…
6 Comments
which ones are you looking at? ektron has a new release coming out later this year that we’re looking at. also dotnetnuke is an open-source platform that you may be looking into.
Are you looking for something free? I haven’t tried it, but a good friend of mine is behind this .NET CMS app: http://graffiticms.com/
I feel for you. We’ve spent months searching and I still don’t think there is a definitive .Net solution. We just wrapped our second site built with DotNetNuke and it was an arduous process but the final results were exactly what the clients ordered. They were happy so we were happy.
Please post your solution when you’ve found it!
Well, we’re still narrowing things down, but I have a hunch DDN is the route we’ll take. Kurt…would love to know what rough timeline you ended up with from start to finish.
Bill…Grafitti *is* nice. Really easy to install. Alas, it’s not really a CMS as much as a nice Blogging engine. Probably the best blog software in .net land, for sure.
Snappa…Ektron and SiteCore on on the commercial options list. But will likely get knocked out due to budget constraints.
Send me an email with any questions and I’ll try to answer them as best as possible.
Full dislosure, I work for Sitecore, but that being said, I think the industry has made some pretty good progress. We recently have launched a free developer only edition of Sitecore called Sitecore Express ( xpress.sitecore.net ), much along the same lines as Microsoft’s SQL Express, et al. Play with it, build your personal site with it, go nuts. We’ve been also focusing more and more on add on technologies that are shared/open source. Not sure what your budget is, but I think Sitecore is one of the best .NET based CMS platforms out there…of course I would