Is Orchard or Umbraco MVC?

Question

I'm much happier with the quality of output I can get with MVC over webforms: hand crafted HTML that isn't full of additional machine generated gubbins (polite term). I realize of course that MVC is about a lot more than this, but concentrating on just that "view" part...

I'm looking at Orchard or Umbraco for a project. I see both support Razor syntax (Umbraco just about) - but with my strong leaning to MVC Views rather than webforms, does that rule out Umbraco?

All the Umbraco reading I've found so far is about the XSLT engine, as the razor syntax is brand new, which scares me :-)

Answer 1

Orchard runs on ASP.NET MVC - it was designed like that from the very beginning. Building apps with it is much like building ordinary ASP.NET MVC 3 application, so the learning curve is not that steep. Also Orchard delivers an extensible component framework to ease building MVC apps, so I guess it's much more than a CMS. And at it's core it uses pure MVC approach (fully controllable and no trash markup attached) to render final output.

Don't know much about Umbraco, though. Tried that some time ago and at first sight it just looked overcomplicated, so I searched for other solution and sticked to Orchard as it appeared pure and simple. It was over a year ago, so at that time Orchard was in pretty early stage (<0.5), not ready for production use, though. But lots have changed since then and now it's a full-featured platform with large community behind it. Not to add that Orchard is free, open-source and has a strong Microsoft support (financial and personal). The team working on it is all ASP.NET guys, so I guess it can't be better:) Btw - the newest Orchard release - 1.1 - will be officially announced on upcoming MIX'11.

I'm currently building two large commercial applications based on Orchard and I'm just very happy with it.

Answer 2

Umbraco 4.7 does not yet use MVC, but you have total control over the HTML output. Razor syntax is supported, for most tasks you won't be needing XSLT anymore.

Orchard is based on MVC, but it's also more than only a CMS. The focus is on developing reusable components.

In my opinion, the most important point whether to go with Umbraco or Orchard is maturity: Umbraco is stable and mature, with a big and very friendly community (which makes up for the slight lack of documentation of the latest features). Orchard's first version was released only recently. Therefore, I'd definitely go right now with Umbraco, but keep an eye on Orchard - there's certainly a lot to learn from this project.