I would advise against wordpress, which is really more of a blogging engine than a CMS. I’ve had good success with Drupal and Joomla which are true CMSs

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Marcus King

I think WordPress is perfectly suited for a CMS.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Ryan Rodemoyer

If you can code and you’re at all open to learning a new language and framework, you should give Django some serious consideration.

Some of the time, you might find yourself reinventing the wheel, and yes, there is some learning overhead, but it’s a really serious contender for “The next big thing”.

It’s major feature (over similar frameworks) is the automatically-generated admin area, which, if your models are logical enough, can be client-ready without any intervention from you. Of course you’re more than able to customise things to help clients.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Oli

Another option, if you do want to sit back and not waste too much time: Concrete5. It’s PHP based and quite new but it’s quite a nice layout and it’s really natural for new CMS users. You can go from a paper-based sitemap and PSD to a full site structure, ready for data entry, within a day, two at a push.

It’s quite heavy though. Give their demo a look in.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Oli

Wordpress is NO CMS.

Wordpress is a very good blog platform, but it’s by no means a CMS – although it can be used as one and the latest versions facilitate that.

Rolling your own is imo a very bad idea. There are plenty of CMS frameworks and tools out there, just try them.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Tigraine

I’ve had experience with Wordpress modifying your html and making things like media placement quite snarky. I’ve grown tired of A)Waiting to click through the Wordpress dashboard to get to the function I need; and B)Constantly modifying and reloading the site to make sure my content is displayed the way I coded it. I think Markus is correct that WP is great for blogs, bad for static or partially-static websites.

I will suggest that if the service you are trying to provide is user content creation, then perhaps you could have a Wordpress component to the site where the user content is shown, but your other work (the static stuff) is built on something else you are comfortable with.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by kevtrout

Try a real CMS like Textpattern (simple and fast but powerful) or MODx (a nice “CMS platform” build for extensibility).
Wordpress is too limiting, writing your own is too much.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Prasinos

I haven’t really tried it yet, but since you said your preferred platform was ASP.Net, you could always check out umbraco.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by andy

Plone
django
joomla
.. and I’m sure lots of others, too 🙂

I personally like Plone, and use it for some things. I also use Wordpress, and I do manual content management (depending on the site).

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by warren

I would go with Graffiti. You have full control over html, and it can be regular blogging platform and CMS.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Hrvoje

Graffiti from Telligent is marketed as a CMS. I use it as a blog engine, and it is tightly linked to the structure/concepts of a blog: chronological list of articles, articles are called posts, comments…

But their blog/site has shown some sites that use Graffiti but are far from looking like blogs.

http://graffiticms.com/

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by postback

I thought about using Drupal, then I was frustrated with how difficult it was to “bend” it to everything I needed. Them someone mentioned ExpressionEngine. It was a solid choice.

You can make a simple blog page with EE, or setup a forum, document library, photogallery, setup custom forms for users to enter info to be stored.

The possibilities are endless. I would recommend EE, because I thought about developing my own custom CMS until I stumbled upon this.

Check out some of the tutorials, it will show you how to load content from the database to the template, just by using tags like: {title} and {body}: http://expressionengine.com/tutorials/

It is made in PHP, but with this, it takes the coding out of development.

After the initial learning curve, it’s all down hill. Good luck!

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Brad

Well many of these answers are fine, but if you are talking ASP.Net, then you really should look at DotNetNuke. It is far and away the most popular .Net CMS with thousands of available modules and skins and one of the most active communities on .Net.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Joe Brinkman

I would avoid Wordpress as a CMS in a professional environment. As stated earlier, it’s a great blogging platform, but doesn’t generally offer the robustness that most professional environments require. I’m a fan of Concrete5 so far as I’ve seen, although you may have to get into a little code to better control some of the formatting errors I’ve seen.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by lush

I have had a bit of pain using blog engines like expression engine to make more static type sites, you end up working around a whole lot of features that you don’t really need, and hacking things together for the things that you do. If your client is just your average small business type, they don’t always relate to blogging terminology or concepts. They just want to update their interweb thingy, with something that works much like everything else they use on their computer.

Writing your own is certainly a large learning experience, and Hofstadter’s Law will kick in like you wouldn’t believe.

In the realm of asp.net, have heard very good things about graffiti, but not used it, was generally impressed by umbraco, have done a few sites with that, you get total control over the output, the ui is great, and clients understand it very easily.

I tried dotnetnuke a few years ago, but found that I had to work very hard to control the output, which (at the time anyway) was deeply rooted in the webforms paradigm, with all the markup horror that entails, although it does offer a huge number of addin modules, and has a massive user base.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by seanb

If you’re looking for a cms in asp.net, you should consider DotNetNuke or if your looking for a blog CMs, you should consider Subtext

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by norbertB

Umbraco was suggested in one of the answers. We’ve had experience with it and many other CMS systems and I can safley recommend you to go that path, it’s both easy to learn and simple to use while remaining a powerful tool to base your sites on.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by joeysim

If you don’t want a complicated CMS, but rather a blog (which is a simple CMS in a way) you could try the Byteflow blog engine. It’s written in Django – a Python based web framework.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Cristian Ciupitu

Since you tagged ASP use DotNetNuke. There are CMS’ written in every language you can think of. But let me plug the grand-daddy, Zope (python).

Also Wordpress is not a CMS. it’s a blogging framework that has some CMS features. But if your need isn’t enterprise level, then Wordpress might be fine.

NOTE: This answer was originally posted at StackOverflow.com by Stephen Cox