I’m somewhat familiar with WordPress and I’ve used it a little. There is a huge community with tons of plugins and themes etc. Does the BlogEngine.Net compare favorably? Is there another .NET CMS that you would recommend?
Thanks for your help.
Does ASP.NET’s BlogEngine.Net Stack Up to WordPress?
Compared to WordPress, BlogEngine.NET is relatively immature and has a much smaller community. That’s not to say BlogEngine isn’t good on its own merits, but it’s definitely more niche where WordPress is mainstream.
As far as .NET CMS solutions, and not just blogging platforms, N2 and Graffiti are both very well-regarded and seem to be widely adopted. They are also both geared towards more flexible CMS than simply blogs, although have blog-like functionality baked in. Of course, N2 is open source and Graffiti is a paid product (albeit quite inexpensive), but both do quite well.
I have no experience with BlogEngine.Net, but to answer your question about any other alternatives, we’re using Sitefinity which is a .Net based CMS, and is highly customizable.
In our experience, it has some performance issues for very large sites, but we’re still by and large happy with it.
WordPress is very slick. It’s mature, has ton’s of templates and plugins and the administrative tool is fantastic. Installation is simple — even on IIS7/PHP.
I am primarily a .Net programmer, though I can work with PHP as well (I just don’t care for it.) So, I’d like to say that BlogEngine.Net could “stack up”, but I think from an operational perspective, WordPress is still the leader.
I think it depends on what matters to you. Give BlogEngine.net a try and give WordPress a try. This isn’t our blog it’s yours. I usually find using it for about 1-3 weeks messing with features and just what feels right for me works the best.
Atomsite is another option, the admin interface looks very similar to WordPress.
I haven’t used it personally, but I’ve heard good things about dasBlog which is an open source .NET blog similar to WordPress.
I’m not that familiar with WordPress, but it does strike me that WordPress is a little bit more than just a blog engine, more of a complete document management solution.
So for me personally, I found that “less is more” I quite like the simplicity of BlogEngine.
We’re using BlogEngine.Net. Yes it is less mature, and sometimes, the community is a bit quiet on the threads. It is well written however and uses ASP.Net webforms. We’ve integrated it with our Profile membership on our site which works well.
However, one thing to note – it was never designed to work on web farms or clouds. There are a few workarounds in the forums to help if you are having problems here…. but it is not ideal.
Editors can’t have their own blogs either. It has been the most asked feature for quite awhile. Again, a few users have contributed solutions to implement this feature, but it will break your upgrade path.
There are also issues integrating Blogengine into a pre-existing CMS and issues with having multiple blogs on the same server. There are definitely hacks that you can implement to do both of these, but we decided it wasn’t worth the energy and just used wordpress.
I run a single user blog and a .Net developer. After checking out BlogEngine.Net and dasblog tonight I will be moving from WordPress to BlogEngine.Net. (Nothing really bad to say about WordPress I just want to be running on a .Net platform)
I’ve used both extensively (at work and home). BlogEngine to WordPress is like Windows 98 to Mac OSX. Yes they both do the same basic things but using one leaves you with a sense of inspiration/calm (WordPress) while using the other (BlogEngine) leaves you uninspired and frustrated. That may be largely due to the lopsided size of the corresponding communities of each platform – but it is what it is. In any case I am forced to use BlogEngine at work – but decided to stick with WordPress for my home/personal blog.
I know it’ll never happy but man I wish there was a .NET version of WordPress!