We are looking for a Asp.net CMS to integrate in our existing Enterprise-Webapplication. Some requirements:
- Full integration in Visual Studio 2010 and our existing Application (so no Umbraco)
- Common ASP.NET Web Forms Developing practices (Global.asax, Masterpages, User-/Custom-Controls)
- Security (FormsAuthentication, custom Membership-/RoleProvider)
- Very flexible and extendable (good API)
- Lightweights CMS with good performance (thousands of simultaneous requests)
- Easy content editing
At the moment we are looking at Sitefinity and N2CMS.
I really like the N2CMS approach (Integrate CMS engine in application) but is it mature enough for “real” usage scenarios? Is there another alternative to N2CMS?
Yes, N2 is mature. Company I work for is using it for more than three years now for various projects, and it is still our platform of choice. Best thing about it is that it is not CM System in a classic manner but rather CM Framework with several layers, meaning you have many things implemented, but they are not part of the core. As a result, you can change almost anything that is not usually changeable in other CMSes.
Also, whole architecture is organized in such a way that you can easily override almost any system behavior with your own implementation. Example? Imagine you reached 100s of news entries under News folder in site tree, and you decide to completely hide them from site tree, instead implementing plugin for manipulating them. Solution? Attribute-decorated class with 10 lines of code for hiding items in a tree based on your custom rule expressed in C# code.
I think N2 is pretty polished product and that you can go for it without too much worries.