I'm in the process of planning out a site for a friend, they need to be able to modify site content, have a products section and shopping/ check-out area. All the products need to be able to be updatable too (descriptions, photos, cost - including delivery, etc).
As I'm a bit of an ASP.NET MVC fanboy currently, I was going to build a quick CMS in my spare time, however, a friend just pointed me at WebQuarters - an open source MVC based CMS.
So, my question is this - given the requirements, does it make more sense to build on top of WebQuarters or go my own route?
Additionally, does anyone have any experience of using WebQuarters...is it any good or should I steer clear?
Thanks,
Kieron
I've been looking at this as well and trying to see how suitable it will be for a similar project I will be starting soon. So far it looks good, but some of the admin parts when your editing your pages don't feel quite as solid (like editing the menu order).
I'm keeping an eye on it though, I think it will be a great library to add to your tool chest.
Related
I have to create a eCommerce store in ASP.NET MVC having some custom features.
After through R&D I have sort listed three major eCommerce frameworks available-
nopcommerce
smartstoreNet ( SSNet)
MVC Music Store
Later after more R&D I have selected smartstoreNet as a base for further customization.
After R&D for weeks still I have many doubts & confusion about smartstoreNet (SSNet), would be more than happy if some one guide me in right direction.
Please take a look at my questionnaires:-
I did not found many review of SSNet on web & on Stack overflow, Please share your experience if you have work with the SSNet. How fast & flexible it is?
2.custom Theme creation or Updation document is not in detail, so how to integrate custom or designer's html/css in its theme
suppose I have added some custom functionality in the framework how it would be affected when I update the SSNet framework to newer versions, should I use custom plugins or keep track of my custom development & re -implement everything after version updation.
How efficient the system to handle medium load eCommerce shop having 500-1000 products, speed can't be compromised.
There is a ongoing legal battle between NopCommerce Vs SSNET, how it could affect SSNET users in future in case they lose the case.
I don't expect you to answer all questions :) still pointing me to right direction would be a great help.
I would also select an e-commerce framework/store that is based on the ASP.NET MVC framework.
I have worked through the MVC music store code a while back while learning ASP.NET MVC. I do not know where you stand with ASP.NET MVC but if you are looking to go e-commerce and looking to up your programming skills by using this framework then MVC music store might be a route for you to take. It will put you well on the path of learning this framework. It is really a basic e-commerce store.
If you already have some basic ASP.NET MVC knowledge and looking for something more advanced then I would look at nopCommerce. It is a well thought out e-commerce store and it can easily be customised and extended. You can create your own modules or have them developed for you. It is also easy to setup even if you don't have ASP.NET MVC knowledge - just follow the on screen instructions. It sounds easy right?
I don't have any experience regarding smartstoreNet. If I were to choose one out of the three that you have listed then it would be nopCommerce.
I wouldn't worry to much about any legal battles at the moment - don't let it affect your decision.
Don't know much about SSNet but here's my take on the other two (that i can remember on top of my head :)
nopcommerce - this is very easy to setup. it's extensible bec of support for adding pluggable components/features.
MVC music store - might be too basic for your needs.
Again these are just my thoughts as well based on what you describe for your requirements. Hope it helps. Good luck!
Use MVC, reasons are :
1- Easy to develop, optimize, maintain and make modifications.
2- its scalable and provide everything that a website needs. Dont just look at mvc music store, MVC is highly scalble
3- You can find support while developing mvc on many websites and stakeoverflow also.
Good luck :)
ASP.NET MVC based site is a good choice if you want to control the logic and behavior of the site at a low level. It will take a lot of time/skill/experience to do your own customizations though.
A couple of other out of the box solutions you may want to look at are Magento and Prestashop. These are fully functional ecommerce systems that you can extend with plugins, so quite different to the approach of coding the site yourself. But you may save a lot of time by going with an out of the box solution.
I'm not familiar with SmartStore.Net other than when previously researching this topic myself I was leaning more towards Magento and Prestashop since they had better ease of use.
We have an idea to use ADX with MVC 5 and CRM 2013.
Is it possible?
We are doing background research on this whether to use ADX or not.
We have used ASP.NET with ADX previously.
This will help take a decision and will save our time.
Appreciate help if anyone know about this.
Adx portal - http://www.adxstudio.com/products/adxstudio-portals/
ADX offers a great product with an impressive feature list. http://www.adxstudio.com/products/adxstudio-portals/portals-features/
Like any add-on, look to see if there is something it contains that you deem as being vital and valuable enough to justify. Additionally, does your team have the ability/time to create the end product with or without ADX?
This is an opinion based question and in my opinion, none of the features alone justify the price. Especially seeing that ASP.NET + NuGet pretty much covers most of these features already.
Adxstudio Portals delivers managed forms by rendering a form in an Adxstudio Portal based on a particular form or view customization defined on an entity in CRM. Within CRM, entities can be customized and forms and views can be modified or created depending on your requirements.
https://community.adxstudio.com/products/adxstudio-portals/users-guide/managed-forms/
and
https://community.adxstudio.com/products/adxstudio-portals/developers-guide/web-controls/crmentityformview/
Above is the main reason us to consider ADX Studio.
ADX Studio, offers a good tool set to the client that has an internal developing team that will pick it up after you finish to customize it. Basically you provide some page template and the user is able to mess around with the forms to have a tailored experience (this works well when you don't have any logic on the page, just set the page and you are ready to go). Anything that is not in this category is custom made, means that you need to code it, and you will lose all the additional ADX benefits (for what concerns the read/write to CRM). Consider that a CRM developer is not a full asp/mvc developer, so anything that is more complex than change some code behind in a page template will create you problems, also all the jscript on the adx pages needs to be tailored, and you will need developers that are knowing the current web development standards, from Bootstrap to a decent js framework. Personally I'm not a huge fan, but the built-in authentication and some other features are making it a viable product. Consider that to customize it you will need someone that knows responsive design and js.
I'm developing a site in umbraco, and integrating uBlogsy (blog) in it.
But the problem is, uBlogsy offers its own look n feel. However i want to have my existing website design in Blogging part as well.
here is the link for the same :
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/starter-kits/ublogsy
I've done that manually. but its a time taking process.
Does any one knows, how can i do that? is there any automation available for the same?
Or if there exists any better blog than uBlogsy offering same feature and functionality?
Thanks in advance.
uBlogsy is the de-facto blog package for umbraco so i'd be surprised if you find anything better (the community is encouraged to build upon the best instead of spin up many sub-par competitors, but i digress).
I've done that manually. but its a time taking process.
^^This sounds like you have modified the cshtml markup and css from the package. This is indeed the way to go.
There isn't really any plug-in theming that i'm aware of and it sounds like this is what you're looking for, right?
I've used uBlogsy many times on past projects and usually don't keep anthonys files for template views but rather start with fresh markup to match my wire-comps. Since his files are included - they make a great example for how-to access the data.
Sorry it's probably not what you're looking to hear. But i think it ultimately gives greater control and better result to get hands-on.
I've just installed Orchard and created a sample site. I want to evaluate this CMS to see what it's capabilities are if I could choose it for my CMS of choice for ASP.NET MVC based sites. Has anyone used it to run a custom, highly modified website? Unfortunately no sample sites are provided at Orchard site to see it in action.
I know what my requirements will be and those are quite demanding. I have my own little CMS in ASP.NET MVC 2 which I tailor to my needs anytime I want but it lacks a lot of functionality that you get when you have a bigger team of developers at your disposal like the Orchard has.
The best way to reply to this question is if you can provide some insights into customization and if you can provide a link to a working site.
There are a couple sites out there.. Here are three I have worked on...
These two were for a University, they have a contact us page, Payment system, and also hooks in to multiple databases with a large set of business logic for students and payments. The Registration system also has an updated menu template to deal with drop downs.
http://housing.bathspa.ac.uk/ (v0.5)
http://registration.bathspa.ac.uk/ (v0.5)
My blog jsut has a modified theme which was enough to get me up an running.
http://www.themayneissue.com/ (v0.5)
There are a few open source modules I work on as well..
http://orchardopenauth.codeplex.com/
http://orchardblogml.codeplex.com/
These also allow for customization of the Orchard system
There are two community sites using Orchard, Orchard Gallery and NuGet gallery.
For now me with my team is being writing an appication for nearly two months using Orchard and the only thing I can say is that it is awesome!
Yes, Orchard is very simple for now, but it is so powerfull in the same time. I just love their dynamic shapes and content types. Use it and you'll love it!
And as a bonus:
Just get code from repo and look through it, it shines like a diamond (the only problem is lack of comments). I am sure every MVC developer will find a lot of stuff to learn from it.
There is another web site developed using orchard.
I recently made the decision to develop our new company website (http://www.idealcode.net:8005/AboutUs.aspx) with Umbraco. I hired an Umbraco developer and we started work.
Please don't flame me or anything but I'm starting to worry about my decision.
The main reason why is because I seriously cannot find anything that explains in simple terms the workflow for creating a new page. As a web developer, it seems as much work to create a page in Umbraco than creating one outside of a CMS.
The workflow as we have it is:
Create a master page (probably not required for every page, but in practice seems to be on almost every page)
Create a document type with the PRECISE content areas that will be on the page
I guess at this point our end users can actually create a page...
We spent about 10 hours implementing the blog module and it STILL does not work and the dev needs to customize the template.
As a web developer, I honestly wonder how this is going to save us time? I'm not trying to diss Umbraco--I'm just worried about explaining this to my superiors. I could have created a site with some dynamic areas and blog in ASP.NET MVC in the roughly 20 hours we've spent on this so far...
The best way to get up to speed quickly on Umbraco is to look at the screencasts made from Umbraco corporate:
http://umbraco.tv/products/umbracotv
After that, the Umbraco community is quite good at answering questions and helping out:
http://our.umbraco.org/
As far as your specific question:
I could be wrong, but I think the thing that you aren't leveraging is inheritance. This makes things easier in Umbraco.
First, DocumentTypes can have parents and they inherit the data fields from those parents. For example, a Content Page DocumentType could have the meta information, main content area, and intro text.
Many pages within your site will likely go no further than that. Basically a rich text editor page (think "About Us")
Then when you add the News Item DocumentType, it can inherit all of those fields from Content Page and simply add a Date and Image field (as an example).
DocumentTypes can have many templates available to them. So if the data doesn't change, but the markup (design) does then you can set a new template in the Properties tab.
Templates can have parents as well. So you can build them up like this:
Main Template
|____One Column Layout
|____Generic Content Page
|____News Area
|____Two Column Layout
|____Product Compare
This works just like master pages in ASP.NET.
So this is pretty long winded. Maybe I'll think about a blog post. Does this help at all?
I second your thought, but consider following scenarios:
Umbraco or any CMS is no ideal solution, if:
1) The complete site will end up having only 20 pages
2) There is only a single user / editor of the site
3) The content is not much dynamic and once created will not change over couple of years
4) The site have only maximum 10 end users
5) The data is not pulled from any external source or/and all are static pages
Where as a CMS / Umbraco is solution for:
1) The is dynamic and still growing after first 1000 pages
2) The client have multiple editors and want to maintain history of publications
3) The content is pulled from various external sources
4) Site end users/contributors are 100+ and still growing
5) Last but not least, the site have 1000+++ visitors daily
I can go on and list all the possibilities of having CMS at the first place, but you need to decide and analyse your own requirements. There is no point in deploying a Samurai to kill a mouse, but definitely you should have proper equipment if you are going to hunt a tiger :D, joke apart just don't deploy any CMS for sake of learning.
Mean while, have a look in books available on Umbraco site to get started (http://umbraco.org/get-started/for-developers) or install Runaway module to start with.
Sanjay Zalke
>As a web developer, I honestly wonder how this is going to save us
time
It will save you time once you become proficient. It has a learning curve for sure, but once over that hump it will save you time - (that is not unique to Umbraco). I have used other CMS products that were easier to get my first site up - but then I was disappointed that I pretty much maxed out what the CMS could do for me - so far it doesn't appear that I will outgrow Umbraco's capabilities anytime soon.
Umbraco can be a wise choice if your site content is very dynamic with lots of pages.
The USP of Umbraco is the re-usability of the document types and a clear seperation of mark-up and content. It greatly reduces the headache of the site editor.
Although initially it may seem a bit confusing or i would say intimidating, but with the help of web-casts on http://umbraco.com/help-and-support/video-tutorials and the user forums things can get simpler.
I started using Umbraco a month back and so far experience has been good.
Start thinking about your site in terms of what is in common from one page to another. If every page in your site needs its own master-page than something is wrong. A good site layout will include the flexibility you need from one page to the next, but still enforce consistency and a common design.
Once you have the common elements of all the similar types of pages, start defining document types for this various types of pages. For example, you might have Basic Page document type, a News Item document type. You can define the various other pages, like "HomePage" or "Section Home", etc. If you have a slideshow, you could create a document type for each "slideshow Slide", etc. Umbraco allows you to build out a very flexible content tree very quickly, and is one of its biggest advantages.
Even if I am the only developer on a site, I still prefer using Umbraco over building a non CMS site. Once the site architecture it determined, development becomes very fast.