Use 3rd party CMS Vs. Writing functionality yourself

[MasterBlaster]

Have a look at N2 Cms. It's lightweight and doesn't get in the way like other bigger Cms products.

[garethevans1986]

+1 for Umbraco.

[Cliphead]

That is assuming that the 3rd party is secure.
Wordpress gets a new exploit every week, it seem, or anything else written in PHP for that matter.
Still I agree with the sentiment, Wordpress, especially hosted, that is kept updated, will be more secure than rolling your own.

I get asked to do quite a few websites per year and unless ecommerce or just require a couple of static pages I use Wordpress. The WP people are pretty quick to pick up on vulnerabilities and patch them and this can be set to update automatically.

The issue is plugins. Out of the box I find that WP requires at least a few of these to match the clients requirements and while they might do the job they may not be as secure as the core code. Many plugins do the same job, when was it last updated? Is the plugin author responsive to issues? No site will ever be 100% secure 100% all of the time but I need to know that what I'm using will have timely updates as issues arise.

There are security plugins that will inform you of an updates to any plugins you have installed including themes and very useful they are. So far I've never had an issue but need to do soem effort to make sure theses sites are as up to date as they can be.

[yasockie]

you will be running security scans and paying bug bounties? Sometimes its easier using someone else's work and extending.

That is assuming that the 3rd party is secure.
Wordpress gets a new exploit every week, it seem, or anything else written in PHP for that matter.
Still I agree with the sentiment, Wordpress, especially hosted, that is kept updated, will be more secure than rolling your own.

[vetran]

you will be running security scans and paying bug bounties? Sometimes its easier using someone else's work and extending.

[Gumbo Robot]

I created an admin system, just downloaded a bootstrap admin theme (paid for a decent one). I reuse this or at least part of it on several projects. So the admin site looks the biz.

Use asp.net identity for login/rules etc. MVC5, dapper for DB access.

Then if i need new functionality for example a mini CMS I just add the functionality to this. Sounds like it your mini CMS is pretty basic and I would write my own.

Users also need to be able to upload PDF files which will be shown as links containing a thumbnail of the cover page of the PDF.

That sounds like a ball ache to write so I may continue down the Umbraco / DNN route for the time being.

[woohoo]

I created an admin system, just downloaded a bootstrap admin theme (paid for a decent one). I reuse this or at least part of it on several projects. So the admin site looks the biz.

Use asp.net identity for login/rules etc. MVC5, dapper for DB access.

Then if i need new functionality for example a mini CMS I just add the functionality to this. Sounds like it your mini CMS is pretty basic and I would write my own.

[Gumbo Robot]

Get the Courier Express add on that will help a bit

I'll look into that. Thanks.

[MicrosoftBob]

I think the main challenge is going to be training up my nontechnical client to use use Umbraco from what I've seen of it so far.

Get the Courier Express add on that will help a bit

[Gumbo Robot]

Umbracco is the most flexible and easiest to code on, but it comes with a heavy price of just being a bare bones CMS

But if you use it a lot, and reuse code libraries it quickly becomes a deployment platform and CMS

I think the main challenge is going to be training up my nontechnical client to use use Umbraco from what I've seen of it so far.

[MicrosoftBob]

Umbracco is the most flexible and easiest to code on, but it comes with a heavy price of just being a bare bones CMS

But if you use it a lot, and reuse code libraries it quickly becomes a deployment platform and CMS

[minestrone]

Help:Wiki markup - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Gumbo Robot]

I wrote a fairly effective CMS system myself that was to be integrated into an existing application.

I looked at a few systems but in the end wrote it myself, got a java wiki library (bliki) for syntax conversion and hacked it up in a week.

A page would be a topic and that would have few text boxes for header, menu and footer which were also topics.

Integrated with bootstrap so you could put in raw html which would do your grids and stuff. Fully responsive.

Really you are talking 10-15 pages, and it works better than most of the mince out there.

What did you need the java library for? Not familiar with syntax conversion...

[minestrone]

I wrote a fairly effective CMS system myself that was to be integrated into an existing application.

I looked at a few systems but in the end wrote it myself, got a java wiki library (bliki) for syntax conversion and hacked it up in a week.

A page would be a topic and that would have few text boxes for header, menu and footer which were also topics.

Integrated with bootstrap so you could put in raw html which would do your grids and stuff. Fully responsive.

Really you are talking 10-15 pages, and it works better than most of the mince out there.

[Gumbo Robot]

Putting a website together for somebody.
They want to be able to manage content - Edit / create pages based on 1 column or 2 column template & add a link in the nav bar. Content will go in a database, I guess.

Fairly basic stuff but I'm not that au fait with CMS & the digging around I've done has left me not being able to see the wood for the trees; I'm doing this with the .Net MVC stack so have been looking at Dot Net Nuke & Umbraco.

Half tempted to write the functionality myself - can't help thinking it'll be quicker than getting over the CMS learning curve. Anyone else doing this kind of thing?