Why Another .NET CMS?

There have been several commercial and open source .NET CMS products over the years. DotNetNuke (DNN) is arguably the most notable and most popular. However, it was written in VB.NET and remained that way until earlier this year when it was ported to C#. VB.NET was a deal-breaker for me, as it was for many developers.

Even though DNN is a C# project now—as is another popular open source .NET CMS, Umbraco—both are WebForms projects. Like VB.NET, WebForms is also a deal-breaker for me. While the underlying web framework or programming language used by a CMS is of little consequence to an end user, to a programmer it will likely be important. As an MVC developer, I’ve wanted a CMS that is built on ASP.NET MVC and uses metaphors that are familiar to MVC development. I believe the .NET developer community will gravitate towards Orchard, because its development stack is more in line with modern ASP.NET development practices.