Sites with Enterprise Stability and Open Source Flexibility

Choosing the right CMS is always hard, especially with so many options on the market.

Having a familiarity with the underlying development paradigms of a CMS is one of the key evaluation factors. In this respect, ASP.NET MVC should be on your radar because the framework is established as one of the best and there is a ton of information available about it. Also, using a strongly typed language as C# is easy and fun.

Another important evaluation factor is stability. Your business should rely on a product that is easily upgradable with minimal breaking changes. In addition, support is also important. When you send a ticket, your expectation is that you’ll receive more than a link to the documentation from the tech savvy engineers.

The next consideration, and I call it one of the biggest problems of the enterprise software, is whether you are tied to release dates where it is not possible to get fixes or new features when you need them. One solution here could be to go for an open source project and have the freedom to change whatever you want. However, going down this path could seriously compromise your stability, so this is becomes a major differentiator for the decision making process.

You can avoid this dilemma by choosing Sitefinity.

Sitefinity offers combination of the best of all the above: a stable enterprise software with open source capabilities and the Progress’ legendary support. The CMS is based on ASP.NET WebForms and MVC frameworks. All of the UI controls and page templates are implemented with the help of Bootstrap and AngularJS. The diversity of frameworks allows you to take the advantages of each one and build the most optimized solution for you. The cross references between them is so decoupled that, for example, Bootstrap can be easily substituted with SemanticUI.

The source code of all the UI components (widgets) and the core infrastructure can be found on GitHub. With it you are able to implement updates and new features immediately.

How do I start with Sitefinity

The first thing is to download the trial version and go through the getting started blog post. For those of you that want to deep dive into the details of the open source part of Sitefinity, check the topic about working with the source code of the product.