Your Dream .NET CMS

So, over the past 2-3 years we have been slowly putting together our kick ass .NET based web content mangement system. It is designed not only to sit there and manage web pages like most content management systems, but also to be easily extended for other content based applications (like blogging or knowledge bases for instance). Looks like we will be going into public beta some time soon, but we still have a little time left for your input before then (and, of course, we will have plenty of time for input during the beta as well). What features does your dream CMS have? Do you currently use content management? Did you build, buy, or extend? Is anyone actually using MS CMS? What price range are you considering or would you consider for your next CMS purchase?

A little preview of some of the things you can look forward to:

Built from the ground up in 100% Managed Code (no legacy COM objects to dirty up the class library)
Native XML content support
XSD schema validation
Custom content indexing via schema annotations
VS.NET template authoring support (we use ASPX, so you can take full advantage of the .NET framework)
Built in content placeholders (including the standard HTML/XHTML type placeholders, but also very cool ones like our dynamic form builder, which lets business users very easily create surveys, contact forms, etc.).
Built in RSS Support
Built in XML-RPC/PingBack Support (in case you want to blog)
Document repository with versioning, indexing, and metadata support
User and profile management (SQL and AD support built-in, interfaces provided for swappable providers)
Built in tracking and reporting
Role based content security and permissions
Support for programming of custom approval pipelines
Cross posting
Content staging and versioning
Date sensitive content publishing
Rich base class library (high level APIs geared for the Morts and low level APIs down to the including transaction management and object caching level for the Einstiens and Elvises)
Very clean administration UI (geared for business users, not developers)

Initial feedback has been extremely positive, so I am really looking forward to a more open beta so that we can get a broader range of opinions. If you are interested in finding out more, post here or send an email to me at: jesse@activehead.com and I'll be happy to answer any questions you have.

5 Comments

  • One that I don't need to write a lot of code for.



    I have create one site using MCM$, I have changed companies and now I have the task of removing all MCMS traces from the same website the functionaly was removed before I got there.

    (Commerce will stay though)



    Projects need to be really big to justify a serious (version/publish/rollback...) CMS.



    When the price can be compared to hiring a person to make html pages one wonders.

  • Almost forgot : seamless support for multiple languages.

  • Yah. Only a little code was a big one for me too. You can get sites up and running on our CMS with 0 lines of code, but we do provide all sorts of hooks if you really want to write more :-).

  • Look at dScribe. My people use it every day, and it does the job without being too compplicated. I know it's not XML compliant, but it's on the way for a future version.

    Our main site Scoilnet is based on this CMS, and I like the idea to have dScribe working also for some others of my projects.

    Open source are the way for me, but surely yes I am not competing with big guns like Vignette.

    I just find more challenging to build one by myself than spending thousands of thousands of dollars and something too complicated and with too much functions.

    Surely your idea about dynamic form builder is cool, but not really easy to implement, unless you want to do this in a windows project, not a web project.

    I did in the past in ASP a form builder for a financial company, and believe me tough. Good luck !

  • We've been doing out .net cms thing since early beta 2, but before that in JAVA/ASP, all in all for about 4 years. We provide most of the thing you listed there except for the native XML support plus some more such as advanced templating. If you'd like to talk about .net cms'ing just contanct me, I'd be glad to talk.

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