Evaluating Umbraco for a magazine site. Any help appreciated.
I'm currently evaluating using Umbraco as a CMS for the website of the magazine I work for. Here are some bits of info and questions about my use case.
The site is currently using Sitecore, but in a poorly implemented fashion. Does anyone have experience in comparing Sitecore & Umbraco performance?
There are about 70k articles that will need to be migrated. Can Umbraco handle this sort of volume?
We have already rebuilt the local business directory and event calendar in MVC, and will be keeping those, so I'd need Umbraco to be able to play nicely with them. Can Umbraco handle MVC sites running in virtuals such as /events and /directories?
The editors love being able to throw together ad hoc lists of articles to appear in sidebars on a whim. Is this easily supported?
Our current plan calls for rolling our own CMS and media gallery, which I'd prefer to avoid if at all possible.
Sorry if this isn't the place for this, but thanks in advance for any feedback!
I can't imagine any reason while rolling your own CMS would be a good idea. It is possible to extend Umbraco as required (e.g. for e-commerce) if you require something that is not included. That way you can spend your energy addressing the business issues ratehr than reinventing the (CMS) wheel.
I'm not aware of any comparisons with Sitecore. But you mention it is poorly implemented. No matter what the technology used it is possible to poorly implement a solution. If your team has Sitecore experience then it may be worth considering redoing it?
Giving the editors the abilty to create a ad hoc list would be simple enough and there would be several ways of achieving this without too much effort.
I'm using umbraco on a site that sounds very similar to yours. It works very well. The editors love it. If you get the chance i would recommend trying umbraco out on a smaller site. It can take while to getting your head around the best way to architect your site. The biggest design decision if what data to store in umbraco and which data to customise. That fact that you've got your calendar in separate db table and not as an umbraco node is good thing in my opinion. Also have a play with the umbraco media library.( oh and use the package improved media picker) Umbraco has a really simple api for managing media.
I have a bit experience with Sitecore and Umbraco.
In brief I think that Sitecore is too slow and confusing at times. The interface is bloated with all sorts of options that easily can confuse editors. I think they would like the much more simple and fast interface of Umbraco.
However I think the media-library in Sitecore is currently better than the one you'll get out of the box in Umbraco. But fortunately it can be extended with the great packages such as Zip Upload, which makes it possible to bulk upload images. And if you combine it with the pixlr package you have a really good editor to edit your images, which gives you a great variety of possibilities.
As for the number of article's it should not be a problem.
The opportunity of selecting articles in sidebars should not be a problem to implement. In fact it should be rather easy. But of course it depends of the complexity of your needs. But it should be rather simple to do.
As Paul is saying don't spend the time re-enventing the wheel doing your own CMS.
Conceptually the way you handle document types, templates etc. are very much alike between the two systems. Maybe you don't need to switch to Umbraco but just need to make it right in Sitecore? If that's not an option I would definentley go with Umbraco as there really are no limits, besides your own skills and imagination, to what you can achieve with it.
"Hopefully Alex from Conde Naste or Keneth from Xeed would like to
comment on this thread as they were instrumental in those
implementations." --> I'm too...
Evaluating Umbraco for a magazine site. Any help appreciated.
I'm currently evaluating using Umbraco as a CMS for the website of the magazine I work for. Here are some bits of info and questions about my use case.
The site is currently using Sitecore, but in a poorly implemented fashion. Does anyone have experience in comparing Sitecore & Umbraco performance?
There are about 70k articles that will need to be migrated. Can Umbraco handle this sort of volume?
We have already rebuilt the local business directory and event calendar in MVC, and will be keeping those, so I'd need Umbraco to be able to play nicely with them. Can Umbraco handle MVC sites running in virtuals such as /events and /directories?
The editors love being able to throw together ad hoc lists of articles to appear in sidebars on a whim. Is this easily supported?
Our current plan calls for rolling our own CMS and media gallery, which I'd prefer to avoid if at all possible.
Sorry if this isn't the place for this, but thanks in advance for any feedback!
Randy,
I can't imagine any reason while rolling your own CMS would be a good idea. It is possible to extend Umbraco as required (e.g. for e-commerce) if you require something that is not included. That way you can spend your energy addressing the business issues ratehr than reinventing the (CMS) wheel.
I'm not aware of any comparisons with Sitecore. But you mention it is poorly implemented. No matter what the technology used it is possible to poorly implement a solution. If your team has Sitecore experience then it may be worth considering redoing it?
Giving the editors the abilty to create a ad hoc list would be simple enough and there would be several ways of achieving this without too much effort.
Cheers
Paul
Umbraco is used by Conde Naste to run the www.wired.co.uk site and the Vogue Japan site from what I can remember.
Umbraco is highly flexible and to roll functionality like what you are talking about regarding lists of articles etc is fairly easy.
Hopefully Alex from Conde Naste or Keneth from Xeed would like to comment on this thread as they were instrumental in those implementations.
Wired UK is using umbraco (http://www.wired.co.uk/umbraco/), if you need as reference.
I'm using umbraco on a site that sounds very similar to yours. It works very well. The editors love it. If you get the chance i would recommend trying umbraco out on a smaller site. It can take while to getting your head around the best way to architect your site. The biggest design decision if what data to store in umbraco and which data to customise. That fact that you've got your calendar in separate db table and not as an umbraco node is good thing in my opinion. Also have a play with the umbraco media library.( oh and use the package improved media picker) Umbraco has a really simple api for managing media.
I have a bit experience with Sitecore and Umbraco.
In brief I think that Sitecore is too slow and confusing at times. The interface is bloated with all sorts of options that easily can confuse editors. I think they would like the much more simple and fast interface of Umbraco.
However I think the media-library in Sitecore is currently better than the one you'll get out of the box in Umbraco. But fortunately it can be extended with the great packages such as Zip Upload, which makes it possible to bulk upload images. And if you combine it with the pixlr package you have a really good editor to edit your images, which gives you a great variety of possibilities.
As for the number of article's it should not be a problem.
The opportunity of selecting articles in sidebars should not be a problem to implement. In fact it should be rather easy. But of course it depends of the complexity of your needs. But it should be rather simple to do.
As Paul is saying don't spend the time re-enventing the wheel doing your own CMS.
Conceptually the way you handle document types, templates etc. are very much alike between the two systems. Maybe you don't need to switch to Umbraco but just need to make it right in Sitecore? If that's not an option I would definentley go with Umbraco as there really are no limits, besides your own skills and imagination, to what you can achieve with it.
/Jan
"Hopefully Alex from Conde Naste or Keneth from Xeed would like to comment on this thread as they were instrumental in those implementations." --> I'm too...
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