Best .Net CMS?
David Veksler
Jon Feaster
Jonathan M. Feaster
Bit Designer
fea...@bitdesigner.com
http://www.bitdesigner.com/
Kenneth LeFebvre
I used to use DNN for my client work, but spent too much time distracted by the overwhelming urge to rewrite so much of the code, that I wasn’t enjoying my work.
Despite the fact that I can’t use my favorite dev tools (i.e., Visual Studio) to work with it, I’ve been using Wordpress for the last few years, because the plugin ecosystem is so rich. I looked into Umbraco about a year ago and liked it better than DNN, but not enough to make the move (I can’t remember specific reasons).
I haven’t used it for anything production, yet, but I’ve been pretty impressed with what I’ve seen of Orchard, so far. Mostly, what’s impressed me has been the codebase. If I’m going to be doing any customization, I want to enjoy working with the code, and I think Orchard is pretty clean. I’m probably going to try using Orchard for my next gig.
I’m not familiar with Kentico, but I’m glad you mentioned it, so I can check it out.
Ken
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Ken LeFebvre
Two Brothers Web Design| www.twobrothersweb.com
Telephone: 216-202-0KEN | Email: k...@twobrothersweb.com
David Veksler
Regards,
David V.
My PGP key: http://rationalmind.net/david/DavidLeoVeksler.txt
Israel Curtis
With the P2P plugin (http://github.com/scribu/wp-posts-to-posts/wiki), you have to ability to create incredibly sophisticated relationships between objects, far beyond simple taxonomy assignments. Combine that with custom post types, and you have the ability to build any kind of CMS…
I know it's not a .NET solution, and that it's not perceived by this group as "serious" enough, but it's served my professional clients well. It has a huge and deep community of developers, and nearly everyone (programmers and authors) has used it at some point, making it a familiar system.
If there's something about the content or requirements of Mises.org that it *wouldn't* be able to provide, I'd love to know. I'm sure there's plenty I'm not aware of...
C. Blake Barber
I second wordpress. I am not opposed to any of the others as well, as I would love to learn a different system. I just think with 14.7% of the internet now using it all our problems could be solved pretty easily. 22% of all new websites are choosing Wordpress. I know these stats don't mean we should use it but the solutions for any problem with it are around.
David Veksler
Israel Curtis
On Nov 24, 2011, at 8:19 PM, David Veksler wrote:
> How would you make a UI such as used at http://mises.org/daily/ or http://mises.org/media or http://mises.org/literature using WordPress?
Very doable - not sure how to describe... Guess I'd have to show. Each is just a condensed display of the asset data. Changing view styles is just a matter of different templates used to output the html, and can be switched via query string or ajax.
I've built a framework plugin for automating a lot of the creation and setup of custom post types / taxonomies / relationships / metadata. I can throw together a mockup site pretty quickly as far as the back end administration and editing of assets - front-end layout design takes a little more time as it's more specific. Maybe that will help...
I could use some kind of organizational chart showing the various object types that need to be managed and how they all relate. I know the basic author/book stuff but haven't seen the full metadata schema...
David Veksler
Israel Curtis
On Nov 24, 2011, at 10:44 PM, David Veksler wrote:
> Is there an example for another site?
The examples I mentioned are internal sites for managing company assets, with no public access, so I'll have to do some screenshots.
> SELECT TOP 10 [ArticleId]
> ,[GUID]
> ,[Title]
> ,[AuthorId]
seems typical. I could use some help understanding the difference between books / online books / resources / literature, etc. I assume everything boils down to a "resource", with all the other terms simply additional terms referencing the type of resource...
> There is also a templating system in place:
this appears to function much like wordpress' infinitely-extensible shortcode system, which we can allow people to enter manually in the body content, but it's often more foolproof to allow them to simply choose related resources from fields right in the content editor, and have the theme templates control format and placement, or have boilerplate just included in the template code.
> [product:10603]
David Veksler
- New York Times, Washington Times, etc: use http://www.saxotech.com/
- The Chicago Sun Times, The New York Post, etc: use http://www.atex.com/solutions/web-cms
- The Economist, New York Observer, Florida Times-Union, etc: use http://drupal.org/
- The Boston Globe: http://www.ektron.com/
- Wired UK (http://www.wired.co.uk/): (not a major site, but it uses Umbraco!)
Israel Curtis
BoingBoing (www.boingboing.net)
Mashable (http://mashable.com/)
TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com)
AllThingsD (http://allthingsd.com)
RealClearPolitics (http://realclearpolitics.com) (very dense content display)
> <Screen Shot 2011-11-26 at 3.59.09 AM.png>
Kenneth LeFebvre
I know that Wordpress wouldn’t be approved for my company’s website (we currently use Ektron), but it has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with approval workflows.
My hunch is that a lot of these sites have similar requirements, that go beyond the basic content management that Wordpress can do. Unless you need the workflow capabilities, I wouldn’t let a survey like this carry too much weight in your decision making process.
I think you need to identify the problems you’re seeking to solve by changing your CMS platform so you’ll know better what will meet your needs. I’m confident that you could build a workable site using any of the major players on the CMS space, but you should also consider such factors as your investment in infrastructure (e.g., Windows versus Linux) and skills (e.g., .NET versus PHP), not to mention the cost of conversion itself.
From: mise...@googlegroups.com [mailto:mise...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of David Veksler
Sent: Friday, November 25, 2011 3:06 PM
To: mise...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [Mises.org Dev] Best .Net CMS?
So I've been doing some research trying to find a news site (kind of like Mises.org) that uses WordPress for the main CMS.
Israel Curtis
On Nov 25, 2011, at 1:20 PM, Kenneth LeFebvre wrote:
> I know that Wordpress wouldn’t be approved for my company’s website (we currently use Ektron), but it has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with approval workflows.
>
> My hunch is that a lot of these sites have similar requirements, that go beyond the basic content management that Wordpress can do. Unless you need the workflow capabilities, I wouldn’t let a survey like this carry too much weight in your decision making process.
I agree. Though as to approval workflows, I have built an editorial workflow into my stock photography client's CMS. They have contributors who can submit, but can't publish, and editors who select and refine content before publishing. There are notifications at each stage. Obviously not nearly as deep as a major news company, but it can be done.
> I think you need to identify the problems you’re seeking to solve by changing your CMS platform so you’ll know better what will meet your needs.
yes - still wondering this myself...
> I’m confident that you could build a workable site using any of the major players on the CMS space, but you should also consider such factors as your investment in infrastructure (e.g., Windows versus Linux) and skills (e.g., .NET versus PHP), not to mention the cost of conversion itself.
yes, yes and yes. Also nclude the factor of owning our code long-term and not being locked in to a proprietary (and costly) vendor...
David Veksler
Israel Curtis
With over 1.4 million visitors (and 3.2 million page views each month), chinaSMACK aims to give Western netizens an often neglected and overlooked view of modern Chinese society by translating Chinese-language internet articles, posts and content into English. Despite having only a handful of contributors all working part-time, chinaSMACK has garnered mentions from major mainstream media including the New York Times, China Daily, Washington Post, Economist, New Yorker, BBC and CNN – just to name a few.
A few months ago, chinaSMACK came to Voxel looking for a backend infrastructure upgrade so they could keep up with their growing traffic. Find below a Q&A with Thomas Barker, chinaSMACK’s Sys Admin, on what he’s done with chinaSMACK’s WordPress site to keep it up and running at peak performance – without significant resource drain.
1) Can you describe the original hosting setup and why you were looking for a new provider?
We used to be hosted at a tiny VPS provider. They didn't cap our bandwidth, which was great. They also couldn't keep their SAN working, which was less great.
2) And what does your hosting setup look like now?
We're running the site on a single VoxCLOUD VPS and all our static hosting [images, CSS, etc.] has been off-loaded onto VoxCAST CDN , Voxel’s Content Delivery Network.
Our backups are handled by Voxel's built-in backup agent which continuously backups our MySQL database, something we can't afford to lose.
On top of that, an open source monitoring package called Munin handles our performance metrics on the VPS, generating pretty graphs and ensuring that we know if our tweaks are actually improving things!
3) Can you share some of the pretty graphs you’re using to give us a snapshot of what you’re monitoring?
The only way to scale WordPress efficiently is not to scale WordPress :-)
Almost all our page views are cached so WordPress never has to worry about processing them. We run a pool of PHP workers using PHP-FPM. Our webserver, nginx, sits in front of that pool and has its own built-in page cache.
Rather than cache each page for a few minutes at a time, we use a WordPress module to invalidate the cached pages when they change. This keeps the WordPress processing to a minimum.
5) Can you dig a little deeper into your caching set-up?
Sure. We're using a custom build of nginx that includes a page cache invalidating module.
Every content page is cached for up to 36 hours or until an action [a comment or an amendment] invalidates it. Nginx Manager pushes all invalidations into nginx from WordPress.
I've experimented with more "sophisticated" mid-tier caching tools using the APC object cache, but I found that they sucked up a lot of memory with only a minuscule performance gain. The cache invalidation wasn't always reliable either.
I found that relying on a decent sized MySQL query cache (which is essential for running WordPress anyway) was just as fast and much more reliable.
If we were a forum site or a Facebook game, page caching probably wouldn’t be enough but it works for what we are. As with everything in tech, Y.M.M.V, K.I.S.S. (Your Mileage May Vary, Keep it Simple Stupid) :-)
6) What other optimizations and tuning have you done to the chinaSMACK website?
Besides investing heavily in server-side page caching, most of our efforts after the initial push have been focused on the client-side. Removing JavaScript libraries and minifying CSS has had a big impact on load times and bandwidth requirements.
Most of the future changes will also focus on the client-side. However, since a lot of our readers have high network latency, we’re also considering tuning our TCP/IP settings.
7) What WordPress plugins are you using?
We use a lot of plugins for everything from image handling to spam filtering. Other areas we depend on plugins for include: spam filtering, web optimization, comment and content management, redirection, mobile, mail and syndication.
8) How are you using the VoxCAST CDN to handle traffic from a world-wide audience?
We found VoxCAST CDN to be incredibly easy to set up using the CDN Rewrites module, so currently all of our static content [CSS, JavaScript & images] is hosted on VoxCAST.
Since we have a global readership, utilizing a content delivery network is very important to us. It means that 90%+ of each page load is handled by a server on the same landmass as the reader – which really reduces load times. Anyone who's browsed a Japanese website from Europe knows how big a difference this can makes!
Nginx can serve tens of thousands of cached page hits per second. With VoxCAST CDN (whose capacity is essentially infinite) hosting all our content except the HTML, the chinaSMACK website can easily handle being featured on CNN or the BBC (and the huge spike of traffic that would entail). That wasn't a possibility before.
The most important change we’ve seen is reliability. Voxel simply hasn't gone down. Our old provider was a constant worry, but now I don't even think about downtime. Everything just works.
Israel Curtis
On Nov 25, 2011, at 1:20 PM, Kenneth LeFebvre wrote:
> I know that Wordpress wouldn’t be approved for my company’s website (we currently use Ektron), but it has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with approval workflows.
>
> My hunch is that a lot of these sites have similar requirements, that go beyond the basic content management that Wordpress can do. Unless you need the workflow capabilities, I wouldn’t let a survey like this carry too much weight in your decision making process.
I agree. Though as to approval workflows, I have built an editorial workflow into my stock photography client's CMS. They have contributors who can submit, but can't publish, and editors who select and refine content before publishing. There are notifications at each stage. Obviously not nearly as deep as a major news company, but it can be done.
> I think you need to identify the problems you’re seeking to solve by changing your CMS platform so you’ll know better what will meet your needs.
yes - still wondering this myself...
> I’m confident that you could build a workable site using any of the major players on the CMS space, but you should also consider such factors as your investment in infrastructure (e.g., Windows versus Linux) and skills (e.g., .NET versus PHP), not to mention the cost of conversion itself.
yes, yes and yes. Also nclude the factor of owning our code long-term and not being locked in to a proprietary (and costly) vendor...