Is Microsoft the New Web Platform for Open Source CMS?
A flurry of announcements in the last few weeks centers on content management systems and the latest developer tools from Microsoft.
Released in mid-January after a lengthy upgrade cycle, Sitefinity 4.0 was rewritten from the ground up, according to Telerik, with a new ASP.NET architecture that features widgets based on ASP.NET controls, an enhanced interface and support for .NET Framework 4 and the revamped Windows Workflow. Earlier versions of .NET are not supported. Telerik RADControls for Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX, and the OpenAccess ORM are included with the CMS. Telerik acquired Mallsoft, an ecommerce technology company, and has plans to integrate an ecommerce module.
DotNetNuke released version 05.06.01 of its namesake CMS. The oldest, open source CMS for .NET (first released in 2002) is accessible via the open source app gallery for Microsoft's new Web development suite WebMatrix 1.0. DotNetNuke 5.6 also supports Microsoft's new Razor scripting syntax, released this month as part of ASP.NET MVC 3.
In 2011, CMS stands for "cloud, mobile and social," according to Shaun Walker, founder and CTO of DotNetNuke, who talked about the company's plans going forward during a Microsoft Channel 9 interview earlier this month at CodeMash 2011. DotNetNuke supports Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Windows Azure integration is underway, according to Walker, who envisions an on-demand version of the CMS. Plans for mobile and social appear less concrete. The roadmap entails enabling a good Web experience for different devices (including TV) and publishing to social networking sites such as Facebook. Facebook integration is supported via third party modules, but it is not yet part of the core platform.
Drupal 7, the open source PHP-based CMS released earlier this month after a two-and-a-half year upgrade cycle, has a new database layer, which supports SQL Server 2005 (and higher). The SQL Server Driver for PHP 2.0 with PDO support was released in August. The Commerce Guys worked on interoperability with SQL Server and contributed the code, according to Microsoft. Four generic modules developed by Schakra and Mindtree are also available: Bing Maps, Silverlight Pivot Viewer, Windows Live ID and OData. The popular CMS is accessible via the WebMatrix gallery, which also supports Umbraco, Kentico and Joomla.
Microsoft GM Jean Paoli blogged about the new interoperability earlier this week:
"What I think is interesting about the SQL Server Driver for PHP 2.0 is that it enables PHP applications like Drupal 7 to use the PDO "PHP style" and interoperate smoothly with Microsoft’s SQL Server database. This reduces the complexity of targeting multiple databases and makes it easier for PHP developers to take advantage of SQL Server’s business intelligence & reporting feature (which is also included in the free SQL Server Express edition, as well as SQL Azure features like exposing OData feeds."
Read more about Microsoft and Drupal 7 here.
The PHP-based SilverStripe CMS received Microsoft certification for Windows Server 2008 R2 in November.
Content management systems often fall into that wishful thinking category populated by many business intelligence systems and other do-it-yourself analytics software; so easy, even non-techies can use it, right? That oft used phrase, "there is no coding required" struck again earlier this month when Microsoft announced the release of open source Web CMS, Orchard 1.0 on CodePlex. Orchard is built on ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor and SQL CE 4. Developers can use the extension model to build out their CMS projects in Visual Studio 2010.
While CMS marketing is aimed at business stakeholders and Web producers, developers are left with the installation, configuration, customization and daily maintenance. Ever wish your company asked you a few more questions before deciding on a CMS?
"The decision making with regards to public Web sites is getting taken out of developers' hands," says Gabe Sumner, Telerik technology evangelist. "Developers are frequently not the decision makers for CMS purchases. What matters is the people who are creating the content; those are the people who control the Web sites.
"What [a developer's] role needs to be is to create tools that are consumable by people who don't understand the [underlying] technologies--that ultimately empower them to accomplish marketing goals."
Express your thoughts on Microsoft's push to support open source, content management systems. Should developers have a larger role in the decision making about Web sites, content management systems and the underlying platforms? Drop me a line at krichards@1105media.com.
Posted by Kathleen Richards on 01/25/2011 at 8:19 PM