Last week Stephen gave me the heads up to a great open-source ASP.net driven CMS solution, which I had to take a look at. As I looked through it more and more and contemplated the possibility of using this for client projects as well as my own site, it got me thinking I should note a couple of the .net based open-source solutions that I have been using, or am going to be using.
http://www.umbraco.org
The product is called Umbraco, and it's an open-source ASP.net driven CMS that runs with a SQL back end. When I was first introduced to Umbraco I was a bit skeptical as I had been dealing with enterprise CMS solutions that were so all encompassing it was almost impossible to get things done due to the complexity of the system.
Umbraco though is not that way. Simple yet powerful, and very scalable with the entire API exposed for developers to make whatever new functionality they require.
Here are just a few of the features I noticed as I strolled around. I didn't get super in depth but just scratching the surface here is some of what I noticed:
- Multiple User Authoring
- Fairly simple permissions
- Simple UI
- Media Library
- Publishing by date and time
- URL rewriting
- API Documentation
- Uploadable Packages (Starter Kits)
Umbraco also has a blog engine package available that is really easy to install, however if you are serious about writing, I would recommend using the next product I want to highlight as it's a lot more robust blogging platform. It might be best to run a highbred of the two products to get all the things you are looking for.
http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/
The other product that I thought I should mention is Blogengine.net. This is the software that this blog has been running on for about 6 months or so, but I think I have failed to note that I did switch from Thinkjot to this product. Blogengine is also open source, so you can feel free to write any custom functions you would like.
The software is a full fledged blogging system that has contains out of the box functionality for tagging, categories, related posts, multi-authors, archiving, and quiet a bit more.
Blogengine also acts much like a CMS in that it will let you create pages in addition to blog posts. The pages carry a parent child relationship, however the software itself has failed to use that information effectively so far. It wouldn't be tough though to create those functions if you needed that sort of functionality, however if you are looking for CMS like behavior Umbraco is the way to go for that.
That's your lot. Enjoy!