MVC3 - lightweight CMS that can be added to existing application?

Question

I'm trying to find a CMS that can be incorporated into an existing MVC3 app.

I've played with N2, and can't get the damn thing to work in VS2010 or with .NET 4.

Umbarco doesn't appear to support MVC yet

Orchard looks great, but wants to own the whole application.

DNN is just a mess.

Any other brilliant solutions?

Post-mortem Dec 2011

This is an old post, but I thought I'd share my experiences with Orchard, and why I decided to go a different direction.

NHibernate

Aside from the very large number of transactions per page (literally dozens in some cases), each and every query was executed using sp_executesql. While not quite as bad as using Exec(), this rubs me the wrong way. Currently, my database is locked down so that applications can only execute stored procedures - that is, they can't perform select/update/delete, list entities such as tables, get any metadata, etc. This is a requirement for tier-wise unit testing, compile-time verification of the database, security and encapsulation of database logic from the application code.

Source Deployment

Orchard requires that the entire source for your site (views, .cs source files, etc) is deployed to the production server. The sheer number of source files that need to deployed boggles the mind.

Integration with an existing application

The manner in which Orchard is structured effectively requires it to be the point of entry for the web application. This means that you're going to spend some time modifying and reimplementing your app to get it to play nice with Orchard.

Conclusion There were quite a few other issues that I encountered, but those are the highlights. Individually, each of those could have been a deal breaker. Together, they removed Orchard as a viable solution.

I'm now evaluating Telerik's Sitefinity. It's not MVC, which saddens me, but:

2. The admin interface is extremely powerful. Aside from a master page and some stylesheets that I put together in VS, we've been able to handle all of the layout via Sitefinity's admin tools.
3. I mean, it's really powerful. You can use the admin interface to edit the admin interface. Think about that for a minute.
4. Widgets are implemented as ASP.NET user controls. Most of my existing controls just dropped right in with zero modifications.
5. Database access is handled via Telerik's OpenAccess ORM. While Sitefinity doesn't natively use stored procedures, OpenAccess fully supports using them for all operations. Also, according to Telerik, OpenAccess does not, in any way, rely on reflection, which provides significant performance benefits in heavy-load apps.
6. There are several solutions available for using Razor markup within widgets, which is one of the great benefits (to me) of using MVC. Also, I've been told that native Razor support is in active development.
7. It's not free. In reality, however, a few grand barely breaks the noise floor in terms of development time.
8. Super crazy fast. Startup time is a bit on the slow side, but once it's running, it's very quick.
9. Built on top of Telerik's awesome, proven RAD controls.

Apologies for the long post. Hopefully this will be helpful.

Answer 1

You might find these projects useful. You can probably model a simple CMS based on one of their projects.

• MvcCms
• MvcMS
• Atomic CMS
• Mytrip.mvc

Answer 2

Try Web Noodles..The new CMS developed using mvc3. WebNoodles.It is easy to integrate .But the thing is it is still in beta stage..But you must give it a try ...