Orchard CMS vs Sitefinity CMS

Question

I want to use some ASP.NET based CMS for creating my website and don't know which to choose...

I begin it in Sitefinity, but with it very hard to manage code as you want... And it generates ASP.NET WebForms code...

Now I heard about Orchard, which is CMS developed by some Microsoft employers, and is ASP.NET MVC 3 based... Now I have some questions about that

1. What advantages have Sitefinity against Orchard?

2. Is there any issues and bugs with using Orchard? Is it comfortable to use?

If you have any other suggestions about using other CMS, I will be pleased)))

Answer 1

full disclosure: I work for telerik, the company that makes Sitefinity, but these opinions are based on my own experiences with both platforms.

as is often the case, it really depends on a) your needs b) your environment and c) your abilities

Sitefinity is uses asp.net webforms so indeed that is the paradigm behind its pages and controls. This has the advantage that if you are experience with ASP.NET, you've already got a lot of the skills needed to customize and extend Sitefinity. Templates are simply master pages, widgets are simply ascx user controls, and themes are standard asp.net themes.

Orchard follows a parallel of this approach, but as you said, in the MVC world. It makes use of views, layouts, controllers, and other mvc patterns as its foundation. If you're strong with asp.net MVC, it can be a pretty solid platform.

As Mystere Man pointed out, it is relatively new CMS, and I might add seems to be mostly community based. When trying to figure things out in a project I was working on, I felt like I was at the mercy of whatever developer created that one component of the platform and whenver he or she had time to respond.

On the other hand, one of the many advantages of going with Sitefinity is the excellent support you get from Telerik, as well as an active community forum.

Sitefinity is also ramping up its release schedule, with major point releases coming three times a year as well as service packs in between to improve performance and constantly add new features, always based on feedback from customers.

Ultimately, it is always going to come down to your own experience and what is a best fit for all people involved. A site can have any number of involved people, from developers to designers to content writers and of course your visitors. Try each product and think about how each role will interact with the system, and see which feature set best aligns with your needs on all fronts.

hope this was helpful!

Answer 2

No fully featured CMS is going to be "easy" to program. They might have easy modes that let you color inside the lines, but as soon as you want to do something they didn't account for it gets very hard.

Orchard is a fine CMS, although it's not as mature as many others. You can create your own MVC based sites to go inside it. However, extending Orchard beyond the trivial becomes complex quickly (althought you can do a lot with the trivial).

It's extremely simple to install and use. I'd suggest doing it and playing around with it, also look at the developer pages on the web site.

Answer 3

I have only worked with Sitefinity 3.7. To be honest, and even despite the support from Telerik, I found it extremely difficult to use, once you went beyond the basics.

As regards Orchard, I agree wholeheartedly with Josh that the support is the big issue. Bertrand Le Roy will answer your questions once a day on Stackoverflow, sometimes very briefly. Over 3 or 4 days, you get to the bottom of the problem, but support is something that Orchard needs to improve on, despite Bertrand Le Roy's good will. So with Orchard you are in at the deep end.

The other downside to Orchard is that it has a very poor user interface for the END USER who isn't a programming geek. A programmer can cope with layers and zones and working with lots of them in lists. Ie, Sitefinity is MUCH more WYSIWYG and, I would say, better for the END USER.

For a programmer, however, I find Orchard, despite the minimal support, MUCH easier than Sitefinity.

Two examples of the differences between the two CMS:

1. Menus.

Sitefinity is great, because you have a drag and drop treeview to organise your pages, and this reflects instantly in the menu.

Orchard says they will have a built in hierarchical menu in version 1.5. However, you have to work with entering pages into a form, rather than having a graphical drag and drop situation like in Sitefinity.

1. Pages.

Again, in Sitefinity, you just drag and drop controls onto the page.

In Orchard, you have to configure layers and widgets in a VERY geeky (to an END USER) way.

Also, if for example, you have a site where each page is has a custom header image, plus custom content in left and right columns, then you are going to need a layer for each page that has these extra custom pieces. (Orchard "pages" only allow you one block of content). This can be a nightmare for anyone but the most geeky.

FEEDBACK from USERS:

I developed two Sitefinity 3.7 sites. One for someone with experience with WordPress, another for a couple who run a travel agency and were very IT challenged. I don't get any feedback from our users. Which is the best feed back you can get. Just look at one of the sites (the IT challenged couple):

PrestonReid

We set it up for them over 3 years ago, and haven't heard from them since. ALL the content is input by them.

If we had done the job with Orchard, we would regularly be setting up layers and widgets for them.

MY SUMMARY:

I really like Orchard. I find it easy to use as a programmer. It is a nightmare (I think) for the end user, but if you write a few modules, most of the obstacles are overcome.

For example, I have written a module called Wingspan.Views (not on the gallery at time of writing) that allows for 3 extra editors on each "page" or view as I have called them: one for a Main Image, one for Right Content and one for left content. You also have the plain old Body part to provide the main content. Menus are still a problem I am working on.

We will use Orchard for clients that we have continued involvement with, so we can set up the layers and widgets that are needed. We will develop funcitonality (modules) that will be as complex as the client needs and can afford.

For the IT challenged type of client, we will use Sitefinity 3.7. We will refuse jobs in Sitefinity if complex extra functionality needs to be developed.

NOTE:

One of the best bits of functionality in Orchard is the Shape Tracing tool. Not sure if Sitefinity has something similar.

SO WHAT IS ORCHARD AND WHERE IS IT HEADING?:

Orchard is open source and seems sponsored by Microsoft. As in I think Bertrand Le Roy is paid by Microsoft.

From reading blogs, etc, the idea is to provide code that can be used by other MS partners, eg, DotNetNuke.

To really zing, Orchard needs a MUCH more graphical user interface, otherwise End Users are going to find it way too geeky.

Which is a shame, because for a programmer, it is a great tool that is easy to work with and to configure.

Answer 4

The best way to describe Orchard is that the core works, but the rest of it, the interface is missing. You shouldn't have to edit XML files to configure where content is placed on a page. Ironically, the Orchard team thinks it is more important to automatically download and install modules than it is to provide decent content configuration and creation tools. It seems more like a project to demonstrate .NET's flexibility than a real product.

Sitefinity on the other hand is a more complete and functional product with years of history behind it. The new version 5.1 supports ASP.NET MVC, which unlike Orchard, doesn't add additional complexity to it. Sitefinity's backend is very easy to use. As for customization, it's architecture is very .NET centric. They leveraged as much of .NET as they could, making it fairly easy to understand.

I can't recommend Sitefinity, however, over Orchard for three reasons:

1. The Library Manager imposes a versioning system and likes to store information in the database. You can change it to a file provider, but this only creates a file type with a GUID as a filename. Don't expect your graphic designer to update images using FTP.

2. The performance is horrible and I don't mean milliseconds. It can take several seconds for the site to respond to a request even after warm up! Telerik recommends that you cache everything, but this doesn't seem to help either.

If you must have MVC, find a sample MVC application and customize it to your liking. It is likely to be more performant than Sitefinity and easier to get your head around than Orchard since your wrote it. If you don't care about MVC, I would suggest looking at the latest version of Sitefinity 3.x. Unfortunately, there aren't very many good options available in the .NET space when in comes to CMS.