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.