We are developing a quite ambitious web app in MVC 3.
At the begining we thought of making the public website (comercial and educative content) in an Area in MVC.
Since maintaining that public website will implicate compiling and updating the entire web app, I’m wondering if you could advice of ways to integrate a CMS to our web app.
The public website should display some content from the web app for instance:
- User Registration
- Directory of public profiles
- Some statistics in charts
I suppose that in the CMS I could load those sections in iFrames or load some views via ajax… but this is not the most relevant.
Do you have some experience in doing such integration?
What tools do you use?
I’ve found “Orchard”, Umbraco… and may be DotNetNuke
Pros and cons?
We use orchard for this kind of thing and have recently built a heavily extended version for a commercial training platform.
Its fairly straightforward to extend, and a very good starting point if you want MVC3 + CMS as a foundation.
The worst thing about orchard was the lack of documentation, but that was over a year ago. its looking a lot richer now, and you can fill in some of the gaps with questions and answers on here – if you get stuck, just ask your own as its a fairly active topic on here.
The last time i used umbraco was before they moved to mvc, so cannot comment on that. Had no reason to look elsewhere because orchard has been a success for us.