My journey to find the ultimate CMS

On my adventure to find a suitable CMS I've ducked in and out of DotNetNuke, tried Telerik and the more business oriented ones like Sitecore. Nonetheless by far my most liked to date is Umbraco. In this write-up I set about outlining why I love Umbraco so much and just how using it has made not only my life simpler but has bolstered my career.

I was introduced to it in its early 3.0 days and at the time our company was doing a mass review of everything out there. One of the employees there took a particular risk with the little known Umbraco CMS, something which I remember more for its weird sounding brand. In time we produced a few websites for clients with it and knew that there actually wasn't much we couldn't do with it. I even remember Niels Hartvig coming to our office in Australia provide some coaching. Nice enough bloke although I was beside myself that I never got to go to the training due to other work demands.

When I relocated back to the UK I began work for a travel company supplier who hired me as one of their three architects. The client project was of a decent size and though the company specialised in travel API's and the like, I also came to understand that client was also after a CMS. It was a significant venture but it created several fantastic results:

1. Since Umbraco will only function with UserControls it forced us to modularise all of our current core components. This actually caused us to think more meticulously about our architecture and in the end lead to the construction of a set of completely reusable components which were deployable in any project, whether for Umbraco or not. The fact the Umbraco allows you to pass in parameters to the controls via the CMS was a great selling point. This meant that system managers could adjust certain elements of the booking workflows, bring up to date dropdowns and make modifications to pricing models. In one example we had a challenging time attempting to get the client to concur on the way the airport selector should function. In the end the resolution was to provide all the available selections and allow them to switch these on and off at the leisure. Trying each one out allowed them to get some useful customer feedback and because it was all handled in Umbraco they didn't need to keep coming to us to ask for the change.

2. Multiple levels of access ensured that certain promotion staff could be given specific nodes in the Umbraco tree. From a control point of view this was a real win/win. Marketing managers could leave their marketing staff in charge of key areas of the marketing aspect of the sites without having to get worried about overlaps and duplication of effort.

3. The fact that it was so well recognized was another advantage for me. I remember being in a training meeting with the same client and we were talking about Umbraco macros. During the presentation I lost my way and one of the participants was able to get me back on track simply because he had used Umbraco himself.

I'm thrilled to say that this project was a significant success and in large measure this was attributed to Umbraco's ease of use and therefore upcoming adoption.

Since then I've proved helpful for smaller companies and whenever the need arises for some framework in any project I often like to propose Umbraco as a starting point. Since it has so many features out of the box to help you get you started I often feel its a no brainer. With the new Razor and Cloud incentives I think its just a matter of time before this becomes the defacto open source standard for all .net CMS's.

If your still tintering on the sides and pondering if its worth the time and investment then give me a call. I can promise you will not be disappointed and keep in mind its still free.