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I am looking for a recommendation for a somewhat powerful but more importantly user friendly CMS for .NET.

The ones I have found seem decent at best.

If you say DotNetNuke I will be tempted to reach through this screen and slap you...

Edit: I have made it community wiki. Please add 1 CMS per answer so the best may rise to the top.

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    What ones have you found and what didn't you like about them? – Rebecca Chernoff Jul 8 '10 at 20:04
  • The one most people seem to recommend was n2 and I really didn't like how confusing it was. The most promising one I have found is Orchard but its still to buggy for production use. – corymathews Jul 8 '10 at 20:07
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    I think this is a fantastic question. I have never found one that I deem as user friendly. It is subjective sure.. but this will be a great resource if people contribute to it. It should probably be a Community Wiki. – jessegavin Jul 8 '10 at 20:38
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    @George The invisible hand of the crowd will correct it. None of us is as dumb as all of us! – Wolfwyrd Jul 9 '10 at 9:28
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    HAhAHAA!!! :)) +1 for slapping dnn suggestions ;) – Andrei Rînea Jul 9 '10 at 20:06

12 Answers 12

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As you mentioned, Orchard has a lot of potential, but it is still pretty young and not quite ready for production use. Umbraco is another .NET CMS that has pretty good reviews.

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  • I went to a code camp where an Umbraco dev showed off what it could do. Awesome system, but needs full trust to run so many shared hosting accounts are out. – MrChrister Jul 13 '10 at 0:52
  • Umbraco is indeed awesome – Wil Jul 22 '10 at 11:59
  • You should be able to use Umbraco 4.5 in medium trust - see last comment on our.umbraco.org/forum/getting-started/installing-umbraco/… – Dan Diplo Jul 22 '10 at 13:24
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BlogEngine.NET is a basic open source one that should be considered. It is geared towards blog posts, but it has the concept of "pages" and can be themed very easily.

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I've found that N2 is a very good, user friendly CMS.

I've built a couple of sites on it that I've handed over to fairly non-technical people to run, and they've managed to do so very successfully - one of the users has had experiences of editing web sites in the past, and said that this was one of best ones they'd used.

The latest version makes the editing experience even nicer apparently, although I have to admit I've not had a chance to look at it myself.

I've also written a simple user guide (albeit tailored to the pages I'd produced, but could be a good starting point, let me know if you want to take a look).

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  • Add the user guide! – Wolfwyrd Jul 9 '10 at 9:21
  • @Wolfwyrd: It's a word doc, and in terms of the pages is focused on the site I built, I didn't think it appropriate to include the entire thing in here. – Zhaph - Ben Duguid Jul 9 '10 at 9:29
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    tried probably all .net cms, but N2 beat them all! If there's something like Wordpress of .net, then it's N2. Period. And, important feature for me, adding new content types is really easy (like product/categories pages, details, lists,...) – Hrvoje Hudo Aug 25 '10 at 14:10
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I really like Sitefinity from Telerik. There's a community edition or a fairly inexpensive commercial edition. It's easy to make templates for, easy for end users, and has a well documented API for building custom modules.

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  • User-friendly is a somewhat relative term. However, we genuinely do take this pretty seriously with Sitefinity. Here is the experience we're trying to create - youtube.com/watch?v=gCnYb4MbYD8 – Gabe Sumner Oct 2 '11 at 14:33
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Creating and maintaining a site has never been easier. Graffiti CMS allows you to quickly publish and maintain dynamic content Web sites with little or no knowledge of Web programming.

http://graffiticms.codeplex.com/

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I've been playing with the Kentico CMS recently and that's simple and easy to use. Very powerful as well if you want to extend it.

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I did a research on this not a long time ago. A user friendly CMS is a really basic demand for a CMS. What is it for, what are the things it needs to be able to do...

If usability is a must, Telerik Sitefinity is actually a good choice, and enables you to use a lot of the functionalities a Web CMS needs.

If money is not an issue... I would recommend Sitecore. Stable, endless possibilities and user friendly!

PS: 2 CMS' in one answer ;)

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Sitecore is a powerhouse commercial CMS, but is somewhat expensive. It has a very expansive editor UI, with all types of customization.

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I would vouch for Umbraco. It's not called the "friendly CMS" for nothing. I've built a lot of sites in it and it's very flexible and, importantly, client's tend to like it as it's intuitive and simple to use.

On top of that it's also open-source, free and has a great and active community. It's also powerful - for instance, Microsoft use it to power the official ASP.NET website (check the footer).

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My vote goes to the new MonoX. Apart from all standard CMS features it has a nice selection of social networking modules. Nice, powerful and free.

http://monox.mono-software.com

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Oxite (alpha) is an open source, standards compliant, and extensible content management sample that can run anything from blogs to big web sites.

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Take a look at Composite C1 - it's Free Open Source and available on MS Web Platform Installer and WebMatrix and is imo worth checking out, especially if user friendliness is key. It's based on .NET 4. There is a bunch of UI demo videos here: http://www.youtube.com/user/compositec1#p/u

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