: Choosing open source vs. proprietary CMS Possible Duplicate: Which Content Management System (CMS) should I use? I've been tasked with redesigning a website for a small academic library.

@Debbie626

If you're more comfortable with Drupal/WordPress, you can look to something like Microsoft's Web Platform Installer. It allows you to install PHP and necessary other functions to run things like Drupal or WordPress on an IIS 7 / MSSQL Server.

If you don't want to do something like that, Sitefinity and Kentico and decent commercial applications. The top dog from .NET open-source CMS software is DotNetNuke.

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@Debbie626

There are actually a couple of decent open source .net CMS's available that would work within your current infrastructure, meet your needs for open source and are scalable enough for you to run your 400+ document site.
If you decided to go down the PHP route, I would advise you to consider a few things (which are also relevant to the above and any CMS choice):

Decide if a Page based CMS is for you, or an Item based CMS

The main difference is that with page based CMS's you pretty much deal with the content on a page by page basis, and can be represented like your desktop OS in a folder/tree hierarchy. Item based CMS's treat the information as "items" of data which are defined through their attributes, via tagging and so forth.

Page based CMS's are decent in that if you're confident the content won't really be replicated again, they're quick to edit and setup. Item based CMS's are good for when you want to reuse stubs of content throughout the site.

.NET CMS's

Firstly, you should checkout Umbraco (item). It's a .net CMS, uses limited amounts of XSLT and as you can tell by their marketing, a good solid solution used commercially too. The interface hides it power and complexity. I should add that Microsoft has been pushing this CMS for a while and has a good community around it.

Second on my list is Graffitti CMS (page), whilst I haven't used it directly myself, it does seem to be a decent piece of software.

PHP CMS's

Drupal (item), whilst fairly large, is a very powerful system.The items are referred to as "Nodes" within Drupal. There is a lot of documentation, lots of modules and a huge community behind it. The learning curve is steep, but ultimately rewarding. The sheer amount of sites based on Drupal says a lot about its power.

Symphony CMS (item) is my personal favourite, it uses XSLT (like umbraco) has a small but dedicated community and is nice to work with if you're willing to spend time with your project. It allows you to define your own data model, like Drupal 7 and is versatile in that you're not just restricted to creating websites, because you're in control of the markup. documentation is a little light, but the community is very helpful

Modx (page) Modx is quick to grasp, and is page based, so you can easily visualise your site structure. It has a decent community behind it and plugin modules ready to go.

Ultimately, it's down to what skillset you have, what your infrastructure is likely to be and how much time you can dedicate to learning the quirks of each CMS. No one CMS is a silver bullet, no matter what anyone says but I hope this gives you an idea of your options.

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