Evaluate Asp.Net Enterprise CMS (Sitefinity vs N2CMS)

Question

We are looking for a Asp.net CMS to integrate in our existing Enterprise-Webapplication. Some requirements:

• Full integration in Visual Studio 2010 and our existing Application (so no Umbraco)
• Common ASP.NET Web Forms Developing practices (Global.asax, Masterpages, User-/Custom-Controls)
• Security (FormsAuthentication, custom Membership-/RoleProvider)
• Very flexible and extendable (good API)
• Lightweights CMS with good performance (thousands of simultaneous requests)
• Easy content editing

At the moment we are looking at Sitefinity and N2CMS.

I really like the N2CMS approach (Integrate CMS engine in application) but is it mature enough for "real" usage scenarios? Is there another alternative to N2CMS?

Answer 1

Yes, N2 is mature. Company I work for is using it for more than three years now for various projects, and it is still our platform of choice. Best thing about it is that it is not CM System in a classic manner but rather CM Framework with several layers, meaning you have many things implemented, but they are not part of the core. As a result, you can change almost anything that is not usually changeable in other CMSes.

Also, whole architecture is organized in such a way that you can easily override almost any system behavior with your own implementation. Example? Imagine you reached 100s of news entries under News folder in site tree, and you decide to completely hide them from site tree, instead implementing plugin for manipulating them. Solution? Attribute-decorated class with 10 lines of code for hiding items in a tree based on your custom rule expressed in C# code.

I think N2 is pretty polished product and that you can go for it without too much worries.

Answer 2

We too are using N2. We've used it for a campaign site and now we are building our companies corporate website and the 20-or-so country specific subsidiary sites. It is very fast to develop on (if you are a .net programmer it is a treat, an html-guy might find it difficult). Extremely flexible and extensible. And so far it seems to be very mature and stable. It has less features in terms of workflow-management than e.g. sitecore, but then again most customers put a lot of emphasis on those things, when they evaluate options, but end up not using them. So I don't think that is a problem.

The problem we are having is that it doesn't properly support preview, so website editors cannot preview their changes before publishing them. It is supposed to be done at some point, but there is no word on when.