I’ve been looking at CMS systems a lot recently.  Here are some of my thoughts:

DotNetNuke

I’m using DotNetNuke for a contract right now.  Although it’s written in Asp.Net and I can code in that easily, it’s a pig to run.  Even version 6, which was released last week, seems sluggish when run in the browser (even on my local machine with 8gb ram). 

DNN is advanced—don’t get me wrong.  There is no lazy-ness there.  In fact, there is so much available in DNN, that it pains me that it runs so slowly.

It’s an okay platform.  But compared to MVC or PHP counterparts, the ASP.Net webforms are still far too slow and lack elegance.  DNN will always have that Asp.Net webform dependency hanging around its neck.

Orchard

Orchard is a new CMS which was started by Microsoft.  I fell in love with it last month.  It’s based on MVC3 with the razor engine.  It supports multiple sites, just like DNN.  There aren’t many extensions or themes, but it’s written in C# so I can easily create what I need.

But, then . . .

But then I looked at the page source after it has been rendered in the browser.  Although it doesn’t have a lot of ugly ViewState like DNN (and all other webform pages have), it does include a lot of stuff that I didn’t put there.  There is huge amount of javascript added which would at least triple the size of my source.  The beauty of MVC is that I have more control of the html—but Orchard adds a stunning amount of code.  Most of it is serialised model information—but I’m not sure why it is on the client.

This really bothers me because I spent a lot of time working with Orchard.  It is not easy to use as an Admin.  While DNN is simple and I could give it to any client to customise, you have to really study Orchard just to add a few things onto a page.  You can’t just add something to a sidebar, for example, you have to create a layer and add a shape, and add some code so it only shows when a page uses that layer or shape.  Really, it was ridiculously difficult.

So, Orchard adds too much to the source and is too difficult to use.  But, in terms of speed, it is very fast.

Joomla

Okay, Joomla is PHP.  I’ve done PHP projects for clients before, so I’m fine with that—but I prefer C#.  I looked at Joomla and Drupal just to see how they compare.

Joomla puts the .net CMS alternatives to shame.  It is easy to set up, the code is very current, and it delivers pages super-fast.  The admin interface is not as easy to use as DNN (in my opinion), but much easier than Orchard.  There are loads of themes and extensions available.  When I did a viewSource, all the html was what I expected it to be.

Why can’t the .net projects be this good?

 

One thing I hear a lot in my contracts are developers comparing .Net, PHP, and Java (and sometimes Rails).  DotNet developers always say .Net is better.  PHP and Java developers talk about how sluggish .Net is and how it is inferior because it requires being hosted on Windows (except for Mono—but who really uses that?).  The truth is, all these languages pretty much do the same thing—they deliver HTML to the browser.  You can write a site in any language and it wouldn’t matter.  I’ve seen .Net sites outperform PHP sites (but unfortunately, it is the other way around). 

I’ve looked at other .net CMS systems lately too (Umbraco, Sitefinity, etc) and didn’t like the look of those enough to even install.

I might start using Joomla.  Page speed is far more important than how easy it is to code.  Hopefully, someone will write a decent .Net CMS system one of these days.

So, I watched the Silverlight Firestarter keynote where some of the Silverlight 5 features were revealed and have to say that it all looks really good. 

There were some pretty impressive interfaces demo’d. 

I’m so tired of hearing how Microsoft is dumping Silverlight.  The keynote alleviated some of those fears, I hope.

The biggest benefit, I think, will be the ability to put breakpoints in xaml databinding.  Most of the Silverlight problems I have are trying to figure out if the INotifyPropertyChanged event was fired for an element in my gui. 

So, life will be easier . . . by the end of next year.

After my initial resistance to using Silverlight, I have to say that I have been using it heavily for the past month and am very impressed with it.  When I look at Silverlight as a web technology, I am amazed by the stuff you can do with it and how extensible it is.

My apprehension was due to web standards.  And I still have concerns here.  Microsoft had a big win when they got SL to work on Macs as well as Windows.  But the lack of a Linux version still bothers me (the Mono guys are working on this).  The biggest blight on the technology is lack of iPad support.

I like HTML and I feel comfortable with it.  When ASP.Net webforms were released 10 years ago, I felt Microsoft were trying to bring a Visual Basic-type development experience to the web.  I can’t tell you how many developers I’ve met who profess not to know html.  They only know the very basics of html and a bunch of tags like <asp:Button>.  With php, classic asp, and the new MVC framework, you have more control of how your page renders in different browsers because you wrote the code to do it.  I guess I’m a purist in this area.

But Silverlight is not html development.  It’s also not flash.  It’s more like writing a client application which runs on the desktop—but has to play safely in a web sandbox.  The rules are all different.  All calls back to the server are asynchronous and you can’t stop and wait for them.  Binding is very heavily used, and the code-behind works better than in ASP.Net because there are no postbacks required.

In the past month, I’ve really geeked out.  I spend most of my time thinking about the project I’m working on and how I can improve it.  I’m reading my fourth book on Silverlight in the evenings and spending the days coding away.  You might think that’s sad (it has been said to me), but I’m really enjoying it.  It won’t last forever, so you need to take full advantage of enthusiasm when you get it.

Anyway, I take back some of the things I said before about Silverlight.