I`m currently investigating how can Umbraco be used in our future projects. I watched Umbraco.tv and read different “Getting started” guides – its strong sides are pretty obvious and its abilities as a CMS are great. What is not obvious is how to work with Umbraco when you want a bit more than just CMS written site.
Of cause no one would write large business application using CMS. But if you have just a bit of complex logic where would you settle it in Umbraco environment? If you need some world-simplest workflow model would you place it into some user control or would you place it anywhere else or may be this is the place to give up Umbraco?…
So maybe the question i am asking is:
What is the level of complexity beyond which you should stop using Umbraco and better write everything from scratch with ASP.NET MVC (or whatever you like)? Where would you place complex logic in Umbraco?
I manage a series of enterprise-level websites with Umbraco. I also have a lot of custom code I wrote myself. Between macros and event hooks and even some other miscellaneous projects written by the community, I haven’t found much I can’t do, though some things are harder than others.
In my humble opinion, the question one should ask is what sort of website it is, not just what level of complexity should determine a threshold. If it’s a content-driven website best served by a CMS, I wouldn’t be deterred from using it just based on having to write some custom code. There are lots of ways to add your code to extend Umbraco. If the site content is largely application-driven, I wouldn’t try to force it into a CMS just for the sake of being able to.
Hope this helps.