Why Umbraco?
You may not have realised this, but there's literally hundreds of CMS products available on the market.... So you might be thinking, "what makes Umbraco so great, surely there's something else I should be using".
Well, the honest answer is both, yes and no. It just depends on what it is you need it to do.
You see, although there's a long list of things you can consider when choosing a CMS, the three most important I hear from my customers are "how much will it cost", "will it run on my organisations IT systems" and "will it be easy for site editors to create and manage content" These three key questions are discussed below.
How much does Umbraco cost
Umbraco is an "open source" CMS which means it's free to download and use. The company behind Umbraco do offer a number of commercial products and support packages which can be purchased if needed, however none of these are required to use Umbraco. The other consideration you need to factor in is your staffing costs.
Web server technology choice.
Every CMS needs to run on a web server. There's currently two main options available, with each one having a number of popular CMS products to choose from:
Microsoft Windows
- Umbraco
- DotNetNuke
- Sitecore
- Episerver
Linux
- Drupal
- Joomla
- Wordpress
If your organisation is already using Micosoft technology for it's IT infrastructure then you don't need to worry about this consideration. You probably already have both the server and skill resources you will need to implement an Umbraco solution.
However, if your organisation is currently running Linux for it's IT infrastructure, then you should really consider the additional server and skill costs you will need to implement an Umbraco solution. You may eventually decide that a Linux based CMS product is more suitable for you in the long run.
Page based or content based
Behind the scenes, most CMS products work in the same way, but when it comes to the organisation and layout of the content editing tool there's a couple of different approaches that get used.
Page based
Page based CMS systems, like Umbraco, focus on making it really easy for site editors to create and manage pages. These CMS tools typically have a tree of pages on the left of the editor with the content for editing on the right. It's an easy concept for a non technical site editor to understand and is ideal where the content management tasks need to be spread out around an organisation.
Content based
Content based CMS system, like the Linux based Drupal, focus on creating content for the site first and then mapping this onto pages as required. This approach is generally considered to be much more powerful by CMS 'purists' as it allows for more control over the content, however this power does have a major downside.
In my experience, the majority of non technical site editors struggle with the content editing process as:
- These interfaces are not intuitive, generally there won't be a tree of pages in the site editor that maps one to one with the site navigation.
- The process of mapping content to pages is often seen as confusing.
Time to choose
So if you're looking for a CMS with the following:
- Runs on Microsoft server technology
- Is page based with an intuitive tree based structure and wysiwyg content editor
- Has a powerful API making it easy for developers to add custom functionality
- Doesn't impose restrictions on page layout.
- Is open source, which means it's free to use (but is backed by a solid commercial company)
- Has a large and active developer community which means the product should have a secure future
Then Umbraco looks like it might be the CMS for you
Where does Umbraco work best?
In my opinion, Umbraco is best suited to the corporate environment for the following reasons:
- Microsoft technology is used by a large number of corporate organisations and these will probably already have the server resource and skills required
- It's ease of use by content editors makes it possible to spread the content creation process throughout the organisation without excessive training costs, whilst it's strong permission system allows the site administrator to keep any content changes under control.
- Many corporate environments already have a team of ASP.NET developers in house, so adding custom functionality can be quick and cost effective.
That's it for this section
In the next section you will start to build your own Umbraco site : Umbraco tutorials