I currently have a simple website that I want to convert to a CMS without losing any of the appearance or existing functionality. Also I would like to re-use my existing code for the site where possible and also make use of our in-house libraries and databases.
Orchard seems like a good bet because it also uses MVC 3 however it seems a bit bloated. There is a small project at atomicCMS which looks interesting. Has anyone used this?
Any hints or tips would be appreciated.
There should be a tag for this post called atomiccms but my account cannot create one.
There was a similar question, which you can find helpful.
Moving an ASP.NET MVC 3-based web application to Orchard is a fairly simple task. You just have to wrap it up in an Orchard module.
I have used both Orchard and N2 CMS. Both work on asp.net mvc.
I like the way Orchard is designed, but it is a rather steep learning curve. Also you will need to develop modules if you want to add your own custom functionallity.
After hearing a .netocks podcast on N2.CMS I decided to try it out for a recent project. It has a different approach/philosophy, you can think of it as a 'plugabble' CMS component. You basically keep your existing web app and can use CMS functionallity where it is required.
However, Orchard does have many more modules and skins available. I would definetly give N2.CMS a closer look, especially if you have an existing application.
In Orchard you must run as an orchard module (Mvc Area) and have no direct access to the root web.config. Depending on what you do in your existing app (wcf, etc...) this might be a limitation. With N2 cms you are not restricted in this manner.
Related
I have an MVC6 web site and am looking to simplify content management such as add an ability to edit content online instead of via HTML or database. It is possible to do this all manually via creating models, controlled and pages allowing to edit the data. But I'm afraid that it would be like inventing a bicycle.
Are there any tools that can be installed to an exising MVC6 app and add basic CMS functions?
I'm building one, hoping to launch end of June. I could let you have a preview of an MVC 5 version right now as I'm looking for feedback, but MVC 6 might be available late May early June if that is a suitable timescale. The CMS is a series of NuGet libraries, and its clean, powerful and highly extensible. One of the design priorities is for it to be straightforward to add to an existing site. Have a look at the first version of the site for the CMS
I am trying to learn how to make a site with PyroCMS. I know it is similar to CodeIgniter, but I have not worked on either in the past. I was wondering if anyone could tell me the differences, as most sites talking about PyroCMS will inevitably mention CodeIgniter as an explanation for anything potentially confusing about PyroCMS, but as they are tutorials about Pyro, they will not explain how to program in CodeIgniter. What is frustrating about this is they will not go into many core differences between the two, either, so it's not as easy as looking up a CodeIgniter tutorial and changing a few things.
I was wondering if anyone could tell me the main differences to watch out for that would be relevant for these tutorials. For example, the folder structure seems to be similar, but CodeIgniter has an Applications folder, while Pyro probably has another folder that does the same thing, but the Pyro tutorials don't say what that similar folder is.
PyroCMS is a CMS build on CodeIgniter. PyroCMS is used by individuals, small & medium-sized businesses, and large organizations worldwide to easily create & build a variety of websites & web-enabled applications.
CodeIgniter is an Application Development Framework - a toolkit - for people who build web sites using PHP. Its goal is to enable you to develop projects much faster than you could if you were writing code from scratch, by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access these libraries. CodeIgniter lets you creatively focus on your project by minimizing the amount of code needed for a given task.
UPDATE:
One good overview for PyroCMS you can read here
PyroCMS is built using modular MVC, which means (in short) that each part of the system is its own micro-instance of MVC. This allows the system to be more flexible and cleanly organized than other CMS platforms. PyroCMS describes itself as a simple, flexible, community driven content management system.” And because PyroCMS is powered by CodeIgniter (at least for a bit longer, while the team migrates over to a Laravel backend), it is easy to learn, understand, and own.
CodeIgniter (CI) is one of popular php framework,it is very help full whenever we need to build large websites using php.It has so many libraries,helpers and plugins.But, CodeIgniter is not everything. We will not find 'engine generator' that can build page self. Several frameworks have features like that. For example, they can create web page (that to do basic Create, Read, Update, and Delete operation) automatically. CodeIgniter doesn't do this.
But codeigniter is very useful to decrease our code maximally without loosing functionalists.
I have been deliberating and deliberating. Orchard is clearly powerful and flexible, contains some very sophisticated code. I need to create some specific Wizard/Workflow functionality. I am also using Entity framework instead of NHibernate. It seems to me that it will be better to write this application seperately using simpler code, which I can refactor, and integrate into Orchard via a Wrapper Module, rather than getting caught up in writing a module afresh for the complete Wizard/Workflow. As I say I am learning MVC3 and do not want to overcomplicate my life, just deliver a solution. I will certainly use Orchard for typical CMS website features.
I also still have an unresolved issue of representing Organisations above users, which I have already resolved outside Orchard. This is only needed for the application rather than content management. So in the short term it may be that I keep the authentication seperate.
Does this sound the most pragmatic approach. If there was a good existing module then the decision would be easier. I think they are considering workflow for 1.7, but we are not there yet.
Many thanks,
Ed
It does sound like a safe path, yes.
I am new to open source Content Management System tools. I got a website using Joomla for content management. Now, I am just thinking to Umbraco or Dotnetnuke (any Asp.net based) frameworks to use. Will it be a complex to do this migration. Can you suggest pros and cons for this idea.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks !
For Umbraco ...
Most of your client-side code like HTML, CSS and JavaScript can just be copied straight over, but as expected it may require some fiddling.
As for the data, it might be worth looking into the CMSImport module for Umbraco. As long as you can convert the source data into one of the formats recognised by the module, you should be able to upload your content with ease. I've had no personal experience with this module, but should be worth a shot.
It really depends on the size of the site and the functionality requirements. For smaller sites, it may be as easy as implementing the skin based on the original design (or, if a custom design isn't needed, selecting a free or 3rd party skin) and then manually migrating the content. For really large sites, you should be able to write scripts to migrate the content. I'm not aware of any products that do this. You'll also probably need to select some modules to use for things like forms.
I am starting a project with Sitecore, I have looked for different possibilities. I have some experience with MVC but I don't understand why you want to combine this with Sitecore (6.4).
What are the benefits? Are there any examples of the implementation of (the code of) this (not the configuration on: http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/64/integrating%20an%20asp.net%20mvc%20web%20application%20in%20sitecore%20cms-usletter.pdf)?
Or why shouldn't I use MVC with Sitecore?
So when should I use Sitecore 6.4 with MVC3 and when not? And are there any (code)examples?
Thanks in advance!
I've successfully implemented my own MVP implementation using Sitecore. MVP is a bit more forgiving than MVC, and can easily be integrated into web forms based applications. I used T4 templates to generate Models directly from Sitecore templates using the built-in webservices which worked really well.
Sitecore doesn't support MVC yet (in the recommended release), and trying to make it work is probably not worth the effort. I believe they are working on a version that supports MVC properly, which may be the link you provided. However it's probably also very new and there is a lot of functionality in the old version that relies on web forms. I'd like to see it working under MVC in an official capacity for a few more iterations.
Implementing patterns such as MVC and MVP are all about separating concerns and making your presentation layer unit testable. It also encourages more elegant design.
Just reading the doc it looks like this is a guide for running Sitecore in parallel with MVC. I can't see anything about new rendering mechanisms for Sitecore, which would make templating difficult in anything other than web forms. It would however allow you to use the Sitecore API to build your own templates via MVC Views, but you would loose the inline editing functionality that you get out-of-the-box with web forms.
Using mvp is probably the simplest way to go. I wrote a blog post about it here.
However, we have used MVC3 with Razor before and it worked very well. The only issue is you lose the ability to use Page edit mode as you have to do some hacking of sitecore to get it to work. I'm contemplating writing a blog post about it if people are interested.
Just to follow up.. MVC is now supported in 6.6, which will be released on November 5th 2012. We just saw a demo from John West at the Sitecore Symposium and it looks like a great framework. One of the best things about it is that you can use MVC side-by-side with Web Forms. You don't have to make an all-in bet for MVC, you can just slowly migrate or build new components in MVC, while still running Web Forms throughout your site.