DotNetNuke vs Sitefinity

Question

In 2009 Readers' Choice awards, in the Web Content Management category,DotNetNuke Professional Edition took the runner up spot and Telerik's Sitefinity CMS received an honorable mention, dropping down from the runner up spot last year. I have used both and believe they are great products, DNN being opensource and with broader community, Sitefinity with its suite of radcontrols...

I would like to know what are your thoughts on when to choose one product over the other. What would make Sitefinity a better fit than DNN and viceversa?

Below are some features of Sitefinity which usually are considered an advantage when making a decision:

• In Sitefinity CMS you can use master pages and themes from Visual Studio to build templates. Creating templates in Sitefinity is just combining a master page and a theme from Visual Studio and uploading them to our product.
• Creating modules and plugging them into Sitefinity CMS is easy. For more info on making modules you can review this link.
• Sitefinity’s UI has been designed with a focus on users. You can see our live demo site.
• The Sitefinity CMS was built using the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, so you can use all of the tools inside your Sitefinity project.
• Sitefinity CMS is built following closely ASP. NET concept and is easy to understand and develop on for .NET developers.

Solution 1

Full disclosure: I work for Telerik and, as others have noted, Telerik RadControls are also included DNN. We love the DNN community and regardless of which path you choose, we want to help.

Consequently, I don't want to compare Sitefinity to DNN. Instead, I will simply list below Sitefinity's strengths, from my perspective. These strengths might also be shared by DNN.

Extreme focus on end-user empowerment

At the end of the day, a CMS is not intended for developers. This might be an unpopular statement on this web site, but it is true.

Developers understand the underlying technologies and, thus, do not require a CMS. A CMS enables end-users (people without HTML & programming skills) to engage with the web site. If a CMS fails at this primary task, then it has failed entirely.

This mindset is woven heavily into Sitefinity. The entire admin-interface is oriented around drag & drop widgets. End-users can also make layout changes, build forms, create search indices, etc. using a friendly UI.

Built on common ASP.NET technologies

Although we strongly emphasize end-user empowerment, developer empowerment is equally important. Sitefinity cannot address every niche requirement. We wanted .NET developers to be capable of easily adapting the CMS to address requirements that are specific to their project.

To do this we stuck close to technologies that most .NET developers already understand:

• Sitefinity templates are simply ASP.NET Master Pages
• Sitefinity themes are simply ASP.NET Themes
• Sitefinity widgets are simply ASP.NET controls

I've seen others comment that Sitefinity isn't ASP.NET MVC-based, but this misses the point. Our goal is to help end-users and developers be immediately productive without requiring them to learn new skills. ASP.NET MVC is very promising, but its real-world adoption remains very low. In addition some of the end-user friendly features (like drag & drop widgets) would be difficult to recreate in an MVC environment.

With Sitefinity 4.0 we tried to adopt some of the strengths of MVC:

• We're using the MVC routing engine. URLs are extensionless by default and you have complete control over the URLs that are applied to your web pages.
• Everything is template driven and these templates are under your control. This gives you full control over the markup.
• ViewState can be completely disabled for pages using the CMS.
• All CMS data is exposed through fully RESTful services.

We'll continually watch MVC (Telerik has an MVC product) and adapt with the broader community.

Includes Telerik Developer tools

Telerik recently released an SDK for Sitefinity 4.0. This SDK is designed to help developers create add-on's for Sitefinity 4.0. It also includes:

• Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX
• Telerik RadControls for Silverlight
• Telerik OpenAccess ORM

These tools come included with Sitefintiy and can be used to create add-on's. These add-on's can then be posted to our marketplace. The marketplace can be browsed through Sitefinity and add-on's can be installed (or uninstalled) through the Sitefinity UI.

--

We have so much more planned. The Sitefinity 4.0 BETA is freely available on the Telerik web site. Download it and compare for yourself.

Solution 2

I have used sitefinity (community ed) on a couple of sites. It isn't brilliant (webforms instead of MVC) but for clients who are not programmers it is quite a nice backend management system. Drag and drop template driving page creation is quite good.

I havent touched DNN for a couple of years, it was quite the resource hog last time i looked at it.

Solution 3

DNN has its advantages, being fully visible from day 1, to both the programmers and the users. If you have users who need to see results quickly, this is a good fit.

DNN is also very pattern based, using model-view-controller concept within itself quite pervasively. They may not call themselves MVC complaint, but I think they are just modest.

ASP MVC on the other hand strives hard to be purely MVC and that can sometime tie my hands down, when I try to deviate and realize that it is not going to be perfect immediately...being a perfectionist in a fast moving world can be tough...decisions decisions...

Solution 4

DNN now has the Telerick AJAX controls in it now as mentioned above and I am sure given a bit of time the UI will catch up with SiteFinity

In my opnion DNN is much simpler to develop for and build custom solutions on top of. Having said that it should be noted that I have only worked with SiteFinity on the side as evaluations and never had to build a huge project with it.

DNN fits in with my agile style of building sites and if you really get dangerous can do some unit testing (hard to set up in any web dev but worth it)

my 2 pennies!

Solution 5

I've worked with both DNN and Sitefinity...I'll never touch DNN ever again...the UI for users is horrendous...its not straightforward to develop in. Sitefinity stays out of the way of your custom development. No brainer for me...Sitefinity.

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Comments

[Gabe Sumner]

If your client is a programmer, then they probably don't need you. ;)

[MrBoJangles]

MVC, in my personal experience, makes webforms just seem ghetto. You say over-rated, I say highly rated and for good reason.

[Samuel Goldenbaum]

"For a lot of seasoned developers, the learning curve is just too steep and too much of an investment" = Oxymoron. Seasoned developers would understand the benefits of the MVC pattern.

[dalexsoto]

I would really be interested in hearing comments on Sitefinity 5 =) please Gabe update your answer with new features of it

[John]

ASP.NET WebForms was created to try to get WinForms developers to transition to Web better. MVC is a pattern, like MVVM, MVP, and others. It's definitely been adopted massively as I saw the contract market change from WebForms to MVC quickly at the end of 2009. By July 2010 90% of my work was MVC. The rest was WebForms with patterns. It's not a steep learning curve at all. Was pretty much understanding it overnight.

[Kamran Shahid]

unrelated post edward

[Kamran Shahid]

Also Forums/support of DNN is way a head.They have dedicated geeks answering the problems for general developers. Sitefinity support/forums just looks for formalities. Also in DNN the problems are usually fix in weeks or months time in there release patches. here in Sitefinity show stoppers bugs are also not fixed in years