SiteCore

CMS & WordPress
1

Hi
We’re considering investing in a proprietory CMS called SiteCore. Been given all the sales spiel and it sounds like it meets our company needs however I haev also heard that development on this CMS can be more expense than others. can anyone give me advice or information about what to expect?

Thanks
K

2

Can you provide a little more information? Something along the lines of what kind of company you represent, business problem you are solving with a CMS, development capabilities.

3

I’m not familiar with this framework.

However, with all proprietary frameworks you run in to a huge problem: support.

Wordpress, Drupal, CakePHP, Symfony, etc. are all free. Because they are free, a lot of people use them. A lot of people using them means a lot of people watching for bugs and helping with code.

With proprietary frameworks, there are way fewer people to help, so getting support is much harder. For example, if you ask for Wordpress help on this site, you’re pretty likely to get a pretty quick response since a lot of people use it. However, asking a question about a proprietary framework… well… you only have two replies so far. =p

4

Thanks both. Appreciate your input.

@xtiansimon sure. Its a mid size media company and are tired of having multiple CMS’s to run various not related websites. For staff training, development and flexiblity to move provider, we think a single point CMS that can be used for multiple different websites would allow us more flexiblity. Currently we use a few custom built CMS’s (which finds us locked into that developer), along with a few wordpress managed sites. But we are intend to create more sites and think that now might be a good time too move them all across to the single platform. We have no in-house developers at this stage as we have seen more benefit in outsourcing that side of it.

@samanime so with an open framework we’d forsake some degree of control, and we’d need to hire someone internal to monitor/fix but on the flip side we could benefit from the power of crowds?

Thanks
K

5

Are you doing the development or are they (if you went with this group)? When I first read your post, it made me think you were doing the development (by you, I mean your company). =p

If you are having it built (or customized), it all comes down to the developer.

If it is something that already meets all your needs and you need little to no tweaks, then go with it.

If it still would need some pretty major works, I would look at other open source things that need just about as much work. Hiring a developer to work on an open source framework is going to be easier for two reasons:

  • They have to charge more competitively, so it’d be a bit cheaper.
  • There are generally more developers for open platforms than closed ones.