Integrating an open source CMS framework into existing MVC3 / MVC4 sites [closed]

Question

I've been tasked with finding an open source CMS that can be integrated slowly into a set of existing websites. This way pages can be brought across to the CMS one by one with the site remaining live during the changeover.

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Does anyone have any thoughts, experience or advice on what CMS solution would be suitable for solving the problem I've outlined above?

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I've been trying out the various offerings for the last couple of days and have found the following options. But having very little experince of using a CMS it'd be really helpful to get other views on this from more experienced devs on what pit falls to avoid.

N2 CMS - A mature option, I've got this working but the documentation is really lacking. I've also found it difficult to find the minimum spec requirements for a database and also browser compatibility. I do however like the code structure for creating the template pages.

Phun CMS - this is a new open source project that I really like the look of in the way the programmer is approaching the problem and separating the concerns. It's probably far too new though to really look at at the moment.

Composite C1 - A mature CMS option, great documentation. However says that it only supports IE9+.

Umbraco - not tried yet but looks heavyweight

Piranha - not tried yet but nice website and documentation and also says that it's lightweight.

Answer 1

I'm the lead developer for Piranha CMS so maybe I can shed some light on what Piranha CMS is best at!

Our focus is content management and to have a transparent and lightweight API for developers. Piranha CMS has almost no components or helpers that render any HTML at all, it simply provides a database, a manager interface and a routing mechanism for retrieving the correct data for the current request.

In the case of you having an existing website you could actually bypass the routing completely, add one page at a time in the manager interface and then manually load the Page model in you existing page. This would allow you to keep your original application exactly the same but manage the content form the manager interface.

Hope you find the CMS you're looking for, and if you have any questions about Piranha feel free to contact me!

Answer 2

Another option of a full featured ASP.NET CMS is Orchard. But like all full featured CMS, you are stuck with initial learning curve about the CMS. You are also stuck with using that CMS once you are converted to it, so do all your research and basic site feature development before making the decision on CMS because it will be difficult once you are converted.

Phun CMS approach is different. Realizing that everyone site is customized, except for small things that you allow client to modify and do not need to get called in the middle of the night to make that modification, Phun CMS was born. Modern framework such as ASP.NET MVC already has all the CMS features: authentication, routing, razor templating/theming, etc... Phun CMS just provide a way to store your client dynamic content. You can still utilize everything you already know about ASP.NET MVC and Razor. But I'm also the Phun CMS author, so maybe my comment is (a bit, just a bit ;) biased on this topic.