Looking for a quality, easy to customize .NET based CMS

Question

Our company usually works in PHP or Ruby, but a potential client wants us to build their new website in .NET as their staff works with that stack. We have only one guy in the team with .NET experience, but he has little availability for this project.

So we are trying to find a quality .NET CMS that allows us to build a medium sized website with as little coding as posible. The ideal would be something like Drupal, which allows you to build very complex sites without much coding.

I've heard there are some pretty good commercial .NET CMSs so we are open to that as well, if the license is not too crazy.

Answer 1

There is also Umbraco, which has some pretty big backers (a lot of the Microsoft site uses afaik).

Answer 2

I've used DotNetNuke before and liked it. It is pretty trivial to write your own plugins for it too and they have a free version (open source). You'll need to check their licensing to see if you'll be able to use the free version or not, but I'd still recommend checking that out.

Answer 3

There's Orchard as well. Mirosoft itself has been putting on lot of effort into this. As I understand, a lot of Microsoft sites are starting to use it (nuget.org, for example).

Orchard is open-source, free, content-driven management system developed by Microsoft. Orchard is community-focused project. It’s built on top of ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework with Razor View Engine and SQL Server / CE. The best about Orchard is that it is completely extensible where you can use existing (from gallery) or create your own reusable components, modules, with very small effort.

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