For a serious amount of time, bpk.cc hasn't offered a public
website. While all relevant services that you might have been
consuming here (like E-Mail services) were always available, I
decided to completely re-design the main web presence of this
site.
The reason for this was that the formerly used software to run
this site, BlogEngine.NET, didn't
satisfy all my needs. While this .NET based blogging platform was
absolutely fine for blogging, it lacked the power of a
fully-featured CMS.
But besides blogging, bpk.cc should also serve its visitors with
information's and download possibilities to products (or services)
that I want to offer here, like compactRSS that some of you might
still use on their good old Windows Mobile devices
(although Windows Phone is now the next best thing
out there, served as 7 series, please).
So for all those pretty things (and more) I searched for
something more suitable out there. Namely a fully-featured CMS.
As it turned out, that is pretty hard in .NET land. There are
great products available, but most of them cost a ton of money
which I just can't afford. Even the lower-priced ones are not
really an option for a private, non-commercial site.
For sure, there are also a ton of .NET-based, free or/and open
source CMS out there. While some were never an option (I never
liked DotNetNuke and its sisters which are powerful but somehow
old-fashioned and over-modularized), some looked really interesting
- like Umbraco.
Umbraco really shines with a fresh approach to content
management. Mainly, it appealed to my because there just
aren't any modules like in probably 99 % of each and every
other CMS out there. It gives you a nice framework, some
out-of-the-box functionality ... but at the end ... its completely
up to the developer and/or designer what you pull out of it.
The flexibility is just unbelievable, but for sure you cant just
click a website together in 1 or 2 hours like you might know this
from hyped CMS software like Joomla.
Anyhow, as a .NET developer the decision to switch to Umbraco is
hard. Because you will mainly use XSLT to inject functionality into
your site. You can use ASP.NET user controls too, but it's not the
best practice for most of the tasks.
While XSLT is something that you will starting
to love while learning it, the tool support for writing XSLT is
inferior compared to core code development. Stepping away from most
of the ASP.NET concepts is also a tough step to take.
Anyhow, I'm glad my decision was Umbraco. It really redefines
the way I look at CMS systems.
Modules for a CMS is just the same thing as Apps for a phone: it
looks so good when you first see it, but you just can't stand that
stuff anymore in a very short amount of time.
That said, I will fill up this site with content over the next
weeks. Everyone who missed a download link for compactRSS over the
last months will be pleased to know that also this little, free
feed reader tool for your Windows Smartphone will return. And of
course there are exciting announcements to make regarding the
future of Windows Mobile (Phone) and the future of compactRSS.
Windows Phone 7 Series along with Silverlight and MVVM will be a
big topic here even beside compactRSS. I have written a lot of code
already for this toy and will share some of my code and earned
knowledge here.
So stay tuned, glad to be back online in blogosphere.