Building a CMS in ASP.NET MVC

Question

I'm curious to know if any basic CMS code has been written for ASP.NET MVC.

The reason I ask is, I'm making a data-driven website for a client, and I've already spent a significant amount of time building it from the ground-up in MVC, but now the client wants content management facilities.

Basically they want to be able to add/edit/remove articles and have revision control.

It would be great if I could somehow 'bolt on' the content management without having to start again from scratch, developing it under an existing CMS.

Should I build the article management and revision control myself, or should I re-use some existing package?

Answer 1

N2 does what you describe - "bolts on" to existing ASP.NET solutions (including MVC).

Answer 2

Also, kooboo is interesting http://www.kooboo.com

Answer 3

(I know this question is old, but it still comes high up for the relevant search terms.)

Today I discovered Meek, http://www.adventuretechgroup.com/labs-meek/ , and it was very simple and unobtrusive to add to my MVC project, which I believe is what the original poster would have wanted - bolting on CMS as a feature rather than having it take over your entire site.

Answer 4

Piranha CMS is well suited to bolting on to an existing application. The author of it describes why and how here . To quote straight from that source:

"Our focus is content management and to have a transparent and lightweight API for developers. Piranha CMS has almost no components or helpers that render any HTML at all, it simply provides a database, a manager interface and a routing mechanism for retrieving the correct data for the current request.

In the case of you having an existing website you could actually bypass the routing completely, add one page at a time in the manager interface and then manually load the Page model in you existing page. This would allow you to keep your original application exactly the same but manage the content form the manager interface."

Answer 5

If you are still looking, I've published my new open source CMS here:

• MVCwCMS

I'm actively working on it so I will push more updates soon.

Answer 6

Here is also a quick summary as to how Telerik Sitefinity does it:

http://www.sitefinity.com/mvc-cms

in brief - allows you to plug in standard system.web.mvc.controller classes as widgets, lets you use the API for anything including model binding, standard Razor for a view engine etc.

Answer 7

Heve a look at AtomicCms it's a free open source content management system based on ASP.NET MVC 1.0 http://atomiccms.codeplex.com

Answer 8

Check for Orchard;-) It is based on asp.net mvc.

Answer 9

There is also Oxite which I believe is more of a blog engine.