My quest to find the ultimate CMS

Upon my adventure to find a suitable CMS I've ducked in and out of DotNetNuke, tried Telerik and the more commercial ones like Sitecore. But by far my preferred to date is Umbraco. In this write-up I set about detailing why I love Umbraco so much and just how working with it has made not only my life simpler but has bolstered my vocation.

I was introduced to it in its early 3.0 days and at the time our business was doing a bulk critique of every thing out there. One of the employees there took a particular risk with the little known Umbraco CMS, something which I remember more for its bizarre sounding name. In time we produced a few web-sites for clients with it and realised 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 training. Nice enough bloke although I was beside myself that I never got to go to the training due to other work demands.

When I migrated back to the UK I commenced work for a travel company provider who employed me as one of their three architects. The client project was of a decent size and even 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 major undertaking but it created several fantastic outputs:

1. Due to the fact Umbraco will only work with UserControls it pushed us to modularise all of our present core components. This actually caused us to think more thoroughly about our architecture and in the end lead to the development of a set of completely reusable components which were deployable in any project, whether for Umbraco or not. The fact the Umbraco makes it possible for you to pass in parameters to the controls via the CMS was a great marketing point. This meant that system managers could fine-tune certain features of the booking workflows, bring up to date dropdowns and make changes to pricing models. In one situation we had a challenging time attempting to get the client to concur on the way the airport selector should function. In the end the answer was to provide all the available selections and allow them to switch these on and off at the leisure. Trying each one out helped them to get some practical customer feedback and because it was all managed in Umbraco they didn't need to keep coming to us to ask for the change.

2. Multiple levels of access meant that certain advertising staff could be given specific nodes in the Umbraco tree. From a control perspective this was a real win/win. Marketing managers could leave their marketing team in charge of key areas of the promotional aspect of the sites without having to be troubled about overlaps and duplication of effort.

3. The fact that it was so well recognized was another bonus for me. I remember being in a coaching meeting with the same client and we were talking about Umbraco macros. In the course of the demonstration 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 major success and in large measure this was because of to Umbraco's ease of use and therefore subsequent adoption.

Since then I've worked for smaller companies and whenever the need arises for some framework in any project I often like to suggest Umbraco as a commencing stage. 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 initiatives 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.