For businesses that use websites as a key strategic component of their business, a Content Management System or CMS is a vital. We at Webdatamation have long pointed to the power and flexibility of Sitecore as an outstanding solution in the CMS arena. We’ve been using Sitecore for our own website and for client’s websites [...]
Tag Archive for ‘Management’ 
Comparing Umbraco and DotNetNuke
So if you are going for an open source Content Management System (CMS), which should you choose: DotNetNuke (DNN) or Umbraco.
Both have the advantage of being open source programs, which means they are constantly updated and improved. There are many plugins and applications created by a core of invested users, increasing functionality and removing bugs with regularity.
Still, there are plenty of differences, as anyone who has used both systems will note.
Another Intro to Sitecore
Content Management Systems are everywhere. Marketing analysts, subject matter experts and website administrators are all switching over to CMSs in unison for a lucid separation of presentation from content on their website and/or web service, with more control on the latter. This in turn facilitates reduced IT expenditures for your organization, ensures steady yet consistent content life cycle management and streamlines the target audience to desired areas. Sitecore is one such flexible CMS that seems to fit the above requirements.
Sitecore is based on the .NET technology. Setting up and deploying Sitecore is quite straightforward and you can get started with creating your new website rightaway. Sitecore is totally committed to the .NET framework and hence provides regular stable releases and updates thus complimenting the latest releases of .NET, Visual Studio, SQL server and Windows server.
Intro to Umbraco
With a plethora of Content Management Systems available today, it becomes very difficult to choose form one of them. As a matter of fact, the CMS that you would choose would also depend on the architecture or the platform where you would deploy your project. Having discussed on the Joomla CMS which is based on PHP and MySql, it is now time to review the Umbraco CMS that is based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET technology. Well, this one is for the .NET fans. The entire source of the CMS has been written in C# and is available for the developers to download and modify for free. Yes, Umbraco is open source.
You do not require beforehand knowledge of Microsoft’s .NET framework or C# in particular, to get started with the Umbraco CMS. All you would need is Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) server, where you would host and deploy your website.
Intro to Joomla
We had earlier discussed on the utility of MooTools and JQuery as compact, JavaScript frameworks for rapid, client side code development. While on the one hand having a website with a professional “look and feel”, sliding menus and fade in/out effects will definitely add a competitive edge, however, on the other hand, what about its content?
You need to have your website content updated regularly if you want your visitors to keep visiting your website. This may be easy as it seems, but imagine a situation where regular updating of content may overload the server with information that might be quite cumbersome for you to manage. This is where the need for a Content Management System (CMS) arises and Joomla is one such CMS tool, that we shall be discussing here. Whether you are a professional web designer, delivering high end service oriented websites to your clients or a naive user, just starting off to develop your own personal website with minimal programming knowledge, Joomla can assist you in more ways than one to publish as well as manage the content of your website, right from the word “go”.
Intro to Sitecore
Unlike many content management systems which maintain content in a haphazard manner, Sitecore maintains data in a structured content tree.
Data is represented as items. These items of different types are combined in a tree structure such that an item can have a parent and child items.
Templates are like Object Oriented Classes. A template contains fields that contain the actual content for an item. An item is an instance of a template just as an Object is an instance of a class. A template can have a “Master” which is used to create an item of a template. A master plays the same role as an Object Oriented Constructor. Masters can be configured to specify default values for fields and can specify sub-items that should be created when an item is first created. Templates can be based on other templates and inherit their fields, much like Object Oriented inheritance.