Why Orchard may be the best content management system (CMS) for me.
(2011-07-17)
I have finally started using a CMS. Yes, I am behind the curve, but there had not been any strong motivation for me to use it until recently. For this personal website, I have always wanted to keep it very simple. A CMS would not add significant more features to it. My business websites require full control and extensive interactions with back-end databases and Web services. It is beyond any CMS can practically and efficiently handle.
I recently started to feel the need to write frequently to share what I discover in my technical and business ventures, and express my thoughts on a variety of issues. I realized, in this case, a CMS may save me a quite some time in organizing and posting my writings. This started my search for the best CMS for me.
There are literally about 200 CMS's at the time of this post. The ideal way to assess a system is actually using it. Who could afford the time to try all the potential candidates even if a small fraction of the available systems is chosen. Reviews can be very helpful, but can also be misleading. Reviewers usually do not adequately disclose their backgrounds or emotions attached to certain products. Some people have a religious belief in their favorite technologies; some even treat their admired technical or marketing leaders as messiahs.
I started my search for the CMS for me by checking out big names - WordPress, Drupal. It seems to be commonly accepted that Drupal demands steep learning curve, and requires more tweaking or coding than WordPress. This would defeat my purpose of using a CMS - saving time while keeping things simple. I seriously looked into WordPress. I installed it on two computers - one running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit and the other running Windows Server 2008 R2. The famous 5-minute installation is essentially a joke. It takes 5 minutes if PHP, MySQL have been properly installed and configured, and one is well versed in these two. I installed all the required components, and soon started to get into the mode of online search for solutions to the errors that I saw. I believe many people have made WordPress work on IIS, and I would succeed eventually if I spent more time on addressing the errors one by one. This would be fine if no more issues would come up again. Unfortunately, these issues are good indicators of potential future issues. I have little interest in spending the time to become an expert of running WordPress on IIS.
I believe Microsoft ASP.Net MVC encompasses elegance, flexibility, power and robustness. I have used it extensively with pleasure and high productivity. After a short search of PHP-based system, I naturally started thinking about evaluating MVC-based CMS's. Fortunately someone thought about this much earlier, and his question led to many informative answers and comments. It appears that Orchard, backed by Microsoft, is a favorite in this category. I took a quick look at it, and soon decided this is the system because it has the simplicity, elegance, flexibility and potential power. This is a very good choice for anyone with MVC background, or anyone who have easy access to people with MVC background. The MVC background is very useful or even necessary to set up the system, but the end users do not need to know anything about MVC.
It took me almost a day to get it running primarily due to my mistake of chasing two popular themes then abandoning them eventually. Theme Dark is very good if it perfectly fits the needs without customization. Making change to it turns out to be very challenging. Its CSS file is minified so it is meant to be used without modification. Theme Metal Dark Grey was my first choice because it has a simple and clean look. Unfortunately, it uses nonstandard CSS, and it looks different in IE8. There is a sort of bug near the main menu - a mysterious clickable white bar. I finally settled on theme Contoso by the Orchard Team. It is a solid theme with clean CSS code and a clear structure making customization quick and easy.
In summary, Orchard may be the best CMS for anyone with ASP.Net MVC knowledge or the access to MVC savy people who can help set it up. It is solid, easy to customize, fairly easy to use.