ASP.net site dilemma

.NET
1

This is my first post, and I hope you can help me to understand what’s the best solution to our problem.
I’m not a developer, but I have good experience in web design.

We have a .net site about sport events with special stats and remote score submission features, these customs sections were created by developers.
They also created a custom CMS and custom graphics, no skins system. Other pages are usual static website pages.
The admin panel is very limited, quite raw, and often unreliable.

But we absolutely need to have full control of appearance and graphics.
Since we plan to add soon new features to the site (more events, social network, e-commerce) we are at crossroad.
As it is, the existing .net site has too much appearance and graphics restrictions , we need to separate UI and graphics from implementation, and we need an easier and more effective admin panel.

We’d need something like WordPress dashboard and its many graphics options (themes), with the capability to manage dynamic content and to keep the existing dynamic work done so far by developers (.net).

Any suggestion?

First, better to stay with .net or or to consider moving toward PHP?
Could it be a good idea to create an hybrid site: WordPress for static contents and .net for dynamic ones.
Is it possible to integrate in some way in WordPress existing custom .net scripts created for the sport activity management and stats?
(I’ve read good things about PHP compiler and .net WP plugin)

And ff we stay with .net, could it be a viable solution to adopt the skins system and some of its’s best CMS available (DotNetNuke, Sitefinity; Umbraco, Mojo Portal, etc.)?
Somebody told me that the optimal way to separate design from code is Asp.NET MVC. I don’t know it, is it true?

Please bring me the…light, I have to understand which is the best way to go.

Thanks in advance for your precious help!

2

This is completely a personal opinion, but I’ve found that it’s better to stick within one platform for a single application. I’ve worked with classic asp & .net hybrids, as well as java/.net and a couple other hybrids, and I found that even the simplest interface was likely troublesome, and often was more grief than it was worth. Just dealing with sessions and cookies can be a PITA in the hybrids.

So I personally would suggest that you either a) look into some of the .net CMS options out there (the templating for Umbraco is pretty straight forward and easy to use, IMHO) or b) look at porting the .net applications into whatever platform you choose. It will be easier to maintain (and require fewer developers depending on the application complexity), and easier to interface between the systems.

3

Thanks Dave for your reply!

If I’m understanding correctly your words, we can say that porting the .net specific applications could make our life easier getting same results?
Dynamic content specific apps are for: player’s score submission, score elaboration and individual stats outputting, leaderboard creation for stats and sport event.

Could WordPress be fit enough to do this job, considering also that soon or later we could probably add social network and e-commerce sections?

And when you say porting, do you mean compiling or what?
Which platform would you suggest based on the info I provided you?

Thanks a lot again for your precious help!!

4

Actually, I would first look to see if one of the .net based CMS offerings would be good for you. I know wordpress is the flavor of the day/month/year, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best one out there, and finding an boxed CMS solution would probably be easier/cheaper than having someone port your custom .net app to another language.

Look at the .net CMSes defined here and see if any meet your needs, but you can also search to see if there are more. Try a few out and see what meets your needs - I’ve tried quite a few of them and I have my opinions, but you should try them to see what meets your needs. A number of them also offer professional services to get them started up (that’s how a lot of them keep the products free), so you can contact them to see what would be required to integrate them with your custom application.

5

OT a bit but that list looks slightly dated – you definitely need to get Orchard on there which ate Oxite and a few other things.

6