Open source Content Management Systems

There was a need for me to investigate about several open source Content Management Systems (CMS) for a personal project. It was a big list where I had to choose the better one which suit my requirements. Three systems were in my short-list.

I had already worked with a commercial Enterprise CMS, called Tridion in my company. So, I didn't have any problems when evaluating the functionalities in each system in my short list.

Here I talk about the system which I have chosen to be the best within the short listed candidates.

Umbraco (http://www.umbraco.org/)

This is an ASP.NET based CMS, uses Microsoft Sql Server as the backend. Currently the latest stable version is 3.0.1.

It took more than half-a-day for me to install because there were lots of problems I had to solve during the installation. I found out that, when it is installed in IIS web server, it should be the root application. It cannot be installed in a virtual directory. I used the Sql Server Express 2005 which I installed as an instance (not the default option). It raised a lots of error messages when I tried to access the application saying that it could not get the database connection (even after I configured it properly). Then I had to re-install the database with the default option.

I write this small review with my usage of few hours of the software, so I might have missed a good feature altogether. So, please bear with me. I'll update my blog with my experience later. This is the only CMS which is similar atleast in few features of the standard Tridion software. This has the flexibility of making the building blocks of the web site from scratch. When it is installed fresh, there is no predefined settings, even for the member groups. It is possible to create a simple web site without using the .Net programming knowledge at all. But it is necessary to have enough programming skills to build a sophisticated web site. Developers have the option of utilising the .Net web/user controls or the XSLT style sheet to define the layout and contents.


Other options in my list were Mambo and Cuyahoga. I didn't go deep into the features of Mambo as it has used PHP for its front end which is not suitable for my purpose. The laster has used ASP.Net for front-end and Sql server, MySql or PostgreSql for the back-end. Though this offers flexibility in database, the features were not useful. I can say it has limited range of usage.