My quest to find the ultimate CMS

Upon my mission to find a suitable CMS I've ducked in and out of DotNetNuke, experimented with Telerik and the more business oriented ones like Sitecore. But by far my most liked to date is Umbraco. In this write-up I set about describing why I adore Umbraco so much and just how working with it has made not only my life less complicated but has bolstered my career.

I was introduced to it in its earlier 3.0 days and at the time our business was doing a bulk critique of almost everything out there. One of the employees there took a particular chance with the little known Umbraco CMS, something which I remember more for its strange sounding brand. In time we produced a few websites for customers with it and realised that there actually wasn't much we couldn't do with it. I even recall Niels Hartvig coming to our office in Australia provide some instruction. Nice enough bloke although I was beside myself that I never got to go to the training due to other work necessitates.

When I went back to the UK I started work for a travel company supplier who appointed me as one of their three architects. The customer project was of a reasonable size and although 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 serious task but it created several fantastic outputs:

1. Seeing that Umbraco will only work with UserControls it forced us to modularise all of our present core components. This actually caused us to think more carefully 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 enables you to pass in parameters to the controls via the CMS was a great selling point. This meant that system managers could adjust certain aspects of the booking workflows, revise dropdowns and make changes to pricing models. In one example we had a challenging time trying to get the client to agree on the way the airport selector should work. In the end the solution was to provide all the available selections and allow them to switch these on and off at the leisure. Trying each one out made it possible for them to get some handy customer suggestions and because it was all maintained in Umbraco they didn't need to keep coming to us to ask for the change.

2. Several levels of access meant that certain advertising staff could be assigned specific nodes in the Umbraco tree. From a control standpoint 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 worry about overlaps and duplication of effort.

3. The fact that it was so well supported was another advantage for me. I remember being in a training 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 significant success and in large measure this was attributed to Umbraco's ease of use and therefore subsequent adoption.

Since then I've worked for smaller companies and anytime the need arises for some framework in any project I often like to recommend Umbraco as a starting 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 edge and questioning 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.