.NET CMS high traffic site

We are in the planning stages of creating what could hopefully be a high traffic site that has the following initial requirements

1. Target mobile and desktop browsers
2. Provide rich content to visitors through
- News stories
- Blog Posts
- Videos
- Message boards
- Podcasts
3. Allow publishers to create the rich content and easily publish to the site.
4. Allow a pluggable security model to provide single sign on and integrate with other internal systems behind a reverse proxy.
5. Be Asp.Net / MVC based

Naturally these requirements fit a CMS type system. Was wondering what peoples experiences have been (pros / cons) of using off the shelf CMS systems vs rolling your own. What .Net based CMS systems are considered the 'best'

There has been a bit of a push for using Sharepoint 2010, what are peoples views on using Sharepoint for a high traffic external web site? Is it very customizable? Would it be a good fit to be used purely has a content store and then use the APIs to provide a custom MVC solution on top?

Appreciate anyone's insights / experiences to help create an informed decision.

I would say that [Umbraco][1] is really powerful, but I haven't used it for MVC style apps, although it seems that Umbraco 5 will be fully ASP.NET MVC based


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[Dot Net Nuke][1] is also very mature and has a large community behind it. It seems to work well, although I have no evidence of its performance under high loads. It's not (that I know) MVC based but it ASP.NET based.


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Sharepoint is good for intranet sites with calendars and documents lists etc, but I wouldn't consider it a very good CMS.

[Telerik Sitefinity][1] can definitely support enterprise-level requests. Its not MVC but uses MVVM pattern internally, and has Telerik support.

Its enterprise license is commercial (and expensive) but if you want to aim high, maybe it's worth it.


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SharePoint 2010 has all the requirements you need except for the MVC based approach (It uses .net 3.5 webforms). I know there a lot of enterprise websites running on SharePoint 2007/2010.
Ofcourse you can use all the cms features any cms has in SharePoint 2010 like publish content etc and you can extend it in many ways.

Here is a description on how this all works with SharePoint:

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You mentioned podcasts as a requirement. for that check out the podcasting kit for sharepoint

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For the api you can use it's webservices to retrieve data:

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Sharepoint also has a client object model to connect to the sharepoint data you can access through javascript:

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I would suggest [Orchard CMS][1] if you want to try something new. It's is MVC based, very extensible, and has strong relationship with Microsoft. Even the MIX11 website is [built using Orchard][2].


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[EPiServer][1] can be a good choice, this is a very popular for many businesses. I haven't worked directly with EPiServer, but we have a lot of clients that is very satisfied with that.

[Umbraco][2] is another interesting system that should be checked out. There is a large and growing community around Umbraco, and they also offers a commercial license with paid support. For larger sites I would be skeptical to immature systems like Orchad that it is not sure how long will be supported. Generally there is a lot of smaller promising CMS systems, but it is a bit risky to go with one of these.

I would not recommend SharePoint 2010 as a CMS system for public facing websites. As Rich says it has a lot of other great features, but as a CMS for a public-facing site there are a lot of trouble. It produces ugly HTML, it comes with bloated js-files , and there is no such thing as a good editor dashboard.

It can be done to use SharePoint 2010 as a content store with ASP.NET MVC on top, but I don't see why this should be done. The editor interface will not be that good. With all modern CMS system you have the possibility for inline editing (SharePoint including), with this approach you will need to log in to the SharePoint part of the solution to write/publish articles. If you don't have SharePoint as your internal tool and need to do this because of reuse of content I really don't see why you should do this instead of using a CMS.


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