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I'm much happier with the quality of output I can get with MVC over webforms: hand crafted HTML that isn't full of additional machine generated gubbins (polite term). I realize of course that MVC is about a lot more than this, but concentrating on just that "view" part...

I'm looking at Orchard or Umbraco for a project. I see both support Razor syntax (Umbraco just about) - but with my strong leaning to MVC Views rather than webforms, does that rule out Umbraco?

All the Umbraco reading I've found so far is about the XSLT engine, as the razor syntax is brand new, which scares me :-)

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worth noting that Umbraco 5 is a ground up MVC rewrite. –  Andiih Jan 10 '12 at 23:03
worth noting that Umbraco 5 is 'retired' –  michielvoo Jun 14 '12 at 21:29
worth noting I have a 90% finished project in Umbraco 5 and an awkward call to make to the client today. –  Andiih Jun 15 '12 at 8:21
@Andih - ouch, there but for the grace of god ... –  amelvin Jun 21 '12 at 8:16
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6 Answers

up vote 22 down vote accepted

Orchard runs on ASP.NET MVC - it was designed like that from the very beginning. Building apps with it is much like building ordinary ASP.NET MVC 3 application, so the learning curve is not that steep. Also Orchard delivers an extensible component framework to ease building MVC apps, so I guess it's much more than a CMS. And at it's core it uses pure MVC approach (fully controllable and no trash markup attached) to render final output.

Don't know much about Umbraco, though. Tried that some time ago and at first sight it just looked overcomplicated, so I searched for other solution and sticked to Orchard as it appeared pure and simple. It was over a year ago, so at that time Orchard was in pretty early stage (<0.5), not ready for production use, though. But lots have changed since then and now it's a full-featured platform with large community behind it. Not to add that Orchard is free, open-source and has a strong Microsoft support (financial and personal). The team working on it is all ASP.NET guys, so I guess it can't be better:) Btw - the newest Orchard release - 1.1 - will be officially announced on upcoming MIX'11.

I'm currently building two large commercial applications based on Orchard and I'm just very happy with it.

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I just want to say that Umbraco is open-source, and I guess it depends a lot on what you want to build exactly, Orchard could be a better solution to some websites and Umbraco for some others. –  VinnyG Apr 6 '11 at 14:44
Sorry, my mistake - you're right Umbraco is open-source too (I was thinking about Kentico when writing this words), but lot of features has to be paid for. I agree that choosing one or another should be the case of particular scenario. If you build a custom ASP.NET MVC application, but don't want to start from scratch - Orchard is for you. But if you'd like to run a website and your only need is to easily manage it's content - I'd choose Umbraco. –  Piotr Szmyd Apr 6 '11 at 19:20
I'm going to start with Orchard as I want to pursue the MVC App route. Thanks all of you for the help. –  Andiih Apr 8 '11 at 8:11
The dev on Umbraco 5 has been discontinued as of June 2012. So if you are planning to use it, stick with 4 or go for Orchard –  workoholic Jul 10 '12 at 18:55
Umbraco 4.10+ and especially Umbraco 6+ now support MVC. –  Funka Jun 12 '13 at 23:58
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Umbraco 4.7 does not yet use MVC, but you have total control over the HTML output. Razor syntax is supported, for most tasks you won't be needing XSLT anymore.

Orchard is based on MVC, but it's also more than only a CMS. The focus is on developing reusable components.

In my opinion, the most important point whether to go with Umbraco or Orchard is maturity: Umbraco is stable and mature, with a big and very friendly community (which makes up for the slight lack of documentation of the latest features). Orchard's first version was released only recently. Therefore, I'd definitely go right now with Umbraco, but keep an eye on Orchard - there's certainly a lot to learn from this project.

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Ive read the "The focus is on developing reusable controls." thing a few times now - what does that really mean ? What is a Control in this sense ? –  Andiih Apr 6 '11 at 19:35
As an exemple we have a usercontrol that allow the visitors to sign in for the newsletter witch is connected to MailChimp API and we do use the same cusercontrol for every clients that whant to do the same. –  VinnyG Apr 6 '11 at 21:25
how is that different to the concept of a user control (or server control) in trad asp.net? And in what sense is this the focus of the CMS? –  Andiih Apr 7 '11 at 12:25
there's no difference with other usercontrol, it's just that umbraco is designed so that you don't have to change any code in umbraco base, maybe Orchard do the same, don't know. –  VinnyG Apr 7 '11 at 13:24
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Umbraco v5 (currently RC1 10 Jan 2012) is a ground up rewrite in MVC. It changes the answer to this (9 month old) question.

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Umbraco v5 has now been declared DOA. Guess I backed the wrong pony :-( –  Andiih Jun 14 '12 at 20:15
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Just a quick update on umbraco, as of 13th June 2012, umbraco has ceased development on V5.

They are focusing on a better 4.x with the move to MVC coming but not yet.

As far as I am aware razor support will continue.

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yes. commenting on the keynote... and including a link back to here. –  Andiih Jun 14 '12 at 20:03
Commenting one year later here, Umbraco 4.10+ and the newer Umbraco 6+ now support MVC. –  Funka Jun 12 '13 at 23:59
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We use Umbraco for over a year, they just release 4.7 in witch you can use Razor and it's great! But if you want to build custom usercontrol in Umbraco you have to go webforms way, but since Umbraco it's a CMS for developper, you can almost do anything without having to build usercontrol. This summer Umbraco 5.0 will be release and it will be using MVC, I guess they will rule the CMS world after that ;)

Don't know about Orchard, I was having the same question one year ago and read about Orchard and it does not seems so nice for what I saw.

Anyway, hope my umbraco experience help you take your decision, let me know if you have more question.

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With the 4.7 Razor syntax, do I also need to learn the XSLT mechanisms (it sounds like they are on the way out or at least reducing in importance with 5) or would I need to work with that too to build a site over the next few months ? –  Andiih Apr 6 '11 at 13:23
No, you can build a site only in Razor, and for your information, we upgraded from 4.1 to 4.5 to 4.6 to 4.7 we did not have any big problems. –  VinnyG Apr 6 '11 at 14:39
Also, umbraco.com/help-and-support/video-tutorials worth it when you start using Umbraco, it might be hard at the begining but it worth the learning steps. The razor view engine is easy to learn. –  VinnyG Apr 6 '11 at 14:46
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My take to this whole topic and including the "DOA" Umbraco 5 is that people are afraid of change, Umbraco 5 to me was by far the best CMS in both Razor syntax and MVC platform, everything was simplified. I mean from creating templates to managing content both static and dynamic content. I'm still gonna keep my umbraco 5, work on it locally with the high hopes of it coming back very soon.

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