Kooboo CMS First Impressions
Kooboo is a CMS based on ASP.NET MVC. Recently, I got a chance to take it for a spin, and here are some of my thoughts. Keep in mind that the drawbacks here may come just from my ignorance of the tool use. :) I’ll update this as the more I learn about the inner workings.
Benefits
- Admin Panel’s UI is intuitive for designers/programmers
- Easy to add pages
- Easy to add your own themes/styles
- Easy to create your own type of content
- Easy to add content
- Lots of Features, more than Orchard
- Mature, has been around for a while (2008)
- Views are coded in Razor
- Can connect to MongoDB and other datasource types
- Versioning of any piece of content and view differences
- Manage website resources easily – images/documents/etc.
Drawbacks
May not be a drawback once I figure out the “how” and get better understanding.
- Once a site is created, when I migrated from XML to MongoDB, I lost all the website data from the XML files.
- Admin Panel’s UI may not be intuitive to non-designers/programmers.
- Site directory structure Kooboo generates is not the same as the traditional ASP.NET MVC.
Let’s take a look. For a site I created using Kooboo, named “batman”:
- When a content type is created, it does not create a C# class file. (I didn’t see one at least, in the directory structure.) It does, however, create a MongoDB collection for the content, there’s just no C# class mapped to it.
- There’s no clear way to bind a View to a model class as in traditional ASP.NET MVC since, Kooboo doesn’t create a C# class file. It doesn’t follow the traditional file/folder naming convention: for each View, you map that to a model.
- Community not as large as other CMS communities (Orchard, Umbraco, DNN).
I’ll keep exploring, but this is what I’ve found so far.
Categories
ASP.NET MVC, C#, Databases, MongoDB, MySQL, SQL Server, Web Development