Monday 12 August 2013

Back From the Dead

Well, suffice to say its been a while since I last put anything on this blog but I think its time to change that!

A lot has changed since I last posted, a lot more experience and far more exposure to many new things since getting myself a new job! It's given me a lot of insight into how little I knew at my old place and how set in their ways they were.

I had never used CMS' before, I knew of them but had never used them, I never had a need to. This has changed now however, where I work now uses them a lot. They are certainly best suited to the type of business they offer, they're a fantastic way of getting non-techies to keep a website running. Certainly something I'll be looking to do more reading on for the future, you can never learn too much!

Anyway, on to the tech! I've so far had experience with two CMS' now in my seven weeks here and I must say I've had a far greater experience with one than the other.


EPiServer

EPiServer is a .NET Content Management and E-commerce product company providing robust, flexible and highly customizable software solutions for the next generation of websites. For what it does however, I found it to be overly complex. It requires a stand alone installation for the CMS, it's not something you can just drop into a solution. This installation then lets you point it at solutions to include EPiServer components. Oh, and its not free!


Umbraco

Umbraco is an open-source .NET Content Management system, it does not require any additional component installations, you can just use nuget to add it to your solution. It handles the deployment and configuration automatically. All you have to do is point it at a database. It has a much more simple learning curve than EPiServer to boot.

I'll talk about them a lot further in future posts, that's a really quick, untechie summary but I just had to get down something to get the blog alive and kicking again. I've also got another piece I want to contribute with regards to the whole Mobile Web vs Native app discussion after a recent push at my workplace to start considering a mobile/tablet market.

Fun times ahead!