Gone are the days when websites were made from scratch.
Today website administrators, developers and designers frequently use content
management systems (CMS) to speed up and simplify their digital presence.
Content management systems are geared towards not technical people as well, so
you do not need to have technical know how to build simple sites. However,
professionals with all the knowledge they have can create abstract, vast and
complex sites within a minimum amount of time. CMSes are themselves built on
different technologies such as PHP, PEARL, JAVA, ROR, etc.
CMSes as stated above can be built on different platforms.
They can also be marketed in different ways with different licensing such as
open source, proprietary and commercial. These licenses determine how and in
what condition you can use the software that you downloaded or purchased. Open source software provides you the right to
modify, study and distribute the software itself.
Along with this type of
software you can also get the source code. Proprietary software is also known
as closed source software, the source code is often not provided and unlike in
the open source software you cannot make changes, share, study or redistribute
the software. These software are sold attaching certain conditions and often
restrict how many persons can use that software. There is another type of
licensing which is referred as commercial licensing in which the software
developed are aimed to serve commercial purposes. One thing to note is that
commercial software may be open sourced or closed source.
Most of the open source CMSes are built on open source
software. However, there are others which are built on top of closed source
software. There are various ASP.NET open
source CMS, out there in the net. Instead of focusing on the big and
influential ASP.NET open source CMS, We are going to throw some light on lesser
known CMSes below. In the CMS world, it is unfair to treat the lesser known
CMSes with scorn, because each CMS in itself carries some unique strength,
along with weakness.
So here we are
going to list some of the lesser known ASP.NET
open source CMS.
- Mojo portal: The Mojo Portal slogan, as claimed in their web is “advanced websites made easy.” Mojo Portal is ASP.NET open source CMS, based on C#. Mojo Portal is built in a structured way and implements plugin system. The notable plugins that are available for Mojo Portal are photo galleries, blogs, ecommerce features and event calendars. Wikipedia mentions that Mojo Portal was awarded “Open Source Content Management award by Packt in 2007.”
- Kooboo : Ko0boo is a free ASP.NET open source CMS developed on ASP.NET platform. It is quite popular for creating and managing websites in Europe. Kooboo CMS is a product of Kooboo LLC, which has its headquarters in the USA, China and Netherlands. This CMS is capable of accommodating XML and Html. However, it does not support SQL. Kooboo is Microsoft Azure cloud friendly.
- SprocketCMS : This is another notable ASP. NET open source CMS. In their website, the SprocketCMS team claims they are the most flexible, .net based CMS. Further, in their Google page they state that – “Sprocket gives you 100% control over the look and feel of the website you're developing by separating all UI into a clean and powerful templating system that exposes a useful embeddable scripting language to give you the control you need.”
- N2: N2 is ASP. NET open source CMS, which is worth looking into. In their website, N2 team claims that they are lightweight enough to build “great web sites that anyone can update.” It is built with modular concept in mind which means that N2 CMS can work alongside with different ASP.NET solutions.
