.NET CMS with custom authentication

Question

I know there's tons of questions about .NET based CMS out there, but I have some specifics things I'm looking for.

1) Be able to leverage our application's existing authentication (We have our own implementation of of System.Web.Security.MembershipProvider as well as MembershipUser)

2) Be able to restrict who can view certain pages/segments based on our custom roles, in addition to restrictions on who can edit them.

Maybe most of them support this, but I haven't had much luck finding which ones specifically satisfy these requirements.

(Being lightweight is also a plus, I've read about Orchard and N2)

Answer 1

EPiServer is a commercial ASP.NET based CMS. It is essentially a set of .NET assemblies that you reference and build into your ASP.NET application to turn it into a first class CMS.

It makes use of standard ASP.NET features like the provider model so you can swap bits out.

Answer 2

I don't know how much this will help you but here goes. We did a search last year for .NET content management systems and I wasn't super thrilled. There are a ton of commercial systems that are really expensive and appear to be crap.

I checked out N2 first. It seemed really clean, but it was way too barebones for our purposes. We would have had to do a ton of custom development to meet our needs. It's really a CMS framework instead of a CMS product.

Umbraco was the other system we took a serious look at. It has a lot more features built in and it's a fairly nice system as long as you don't mind a little XSLT. It does use the standard membership provider framework, so that's in your favor. I don't really know whether the roles will do what you want though. But since it's free you can play with it to see if it meets your needs.

As for Orchard, I don't know much about it. It wasn't around when we were looking, but it seems interesting. I couldn't tell in a reasonable amount of time how it handles membership and roles on the back end. It does seem like it's geared towards smaller sites, so it might be a little limiting in that respect.

Answer 3

I would suggest looking into AxCMS (at AxCMS.net). It is complete, pluggable and has extensive documentation. Specific documentation about their implementation of Membership and Security is available at : http://help.axcms.net/en_help_concepts_security.AxCMS Microsoft's Scott Gu recommends it here at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/02/02/437220.aspx

Answer 4

We've been using Telerik's Sitefinity product with custom forms authentication. You can use forms authentication out of the box or you can customise it. It does make use of the provider model too.

More information on custom authentication can be found here.