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I am looking to help out a non-profit get a website up and running.

Only, they don't just want a website with content, they also want to maintain a database of members, and allow those members to register and pay for classes/events/seminars held by the club.

It seems to me, that if all they wanted was to post content, nearly any of the available CMS's out there would fit the bill.

But the registration portion would require some customization.

I have considered just installing a basic CMS for them, and then creating separate web application for the registration section. And this would still work...

But if I wanted to hook into the users/roles from the CMS and use them in the registration side, I think I would have to have some way of either extending the CMS or easily using it's data in the sub-application.

I have been reading about the following CMS's:

  • Orchard
  • Umbraco
  • C1 Composite

All of them seem to have the ability to be extended, but I'm not certain how much "work" is involved to extend each. Given that my requirements are rather simple and the fact that I don't want to spend a ton of time doing this (it is free work, after all), does anyone have a recommendation?

Amanda Kitson
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  • Have you looked at http://www.silverstripe.org? You can build custom page types with custom fields... – mb21 Nov 12 '13 at 13:51

6 Answers6

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I'd pass on Umbraco and C1 Composite, as they generally aren't user-friendly. I think Orchard is best, as it has the best feedback of them all. Umbraco is aimed more at developers who want to tweak a lot of things.

Orchard - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1978360/anybody-using-orchard-cms

Link - Reviews/Comparison of Open Source ASP.NET MVC CMS

Community
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Caffeinated
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    Thanks much for the links and the opinion. =) I was leaning towards Orchard too, but it's nice to see it confirmed by others. And recent confirmations are nice too. A lot of the stuff I'd read on SO about Orchard was back in the beginning of the year, after they had just released version 1.0 and they are on 1.2 now. So I wanted a more current opinion. – Amanda Kitson Sep 26 '11 at 17:21
  • You're very welcome :) All the best! – Caffeinated Sep 26 '11 at 17:22
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    I don't know why you'd choose a CMS for what is essentially an e-commerce solution, but are going to build the e-commerce part yourself. Umbraco is much more mature than Orchard and has 3 rather mature e-commerce plugins for it. I personally consider Umbraco very user-friendly (Adel: who says it isn't?) and if you're used to using user controls, you can use them almost 1 on 1 in Umbraco. – sebastiaan Sep 26 '11 at 18:08
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    "They aren't generally user-friendly" - do you mind to elaborate? – marapet Sep 26 '11 at 18:21
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    If you didn't have the registration part for a non-profit, I would've wholeheartedly recommended Composite C1. That's a pay-add-on for that system. I'd probably go with Umbraco. Orchard is getting there, but it's still not quite there. – Armstrongest Dec 30 '11 at 10:09
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Umbraco would be a very good choice because it:

  • is mature and has a proven track record.
  • is very easy to use for most use cases.
  • has a built-in member system which could (and should) be used for the member registration.
  • has a Big and friendly community always glad to help out.
  • has lots of plugins and extensions covering some special use cases.
marapet
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If you will go outside of .NET and IIS, Joomla is another popular CMS in LAMP. This can be hosted in either Unix or Win environments. There's a large community, lots of implementations and robust API for plugins. I run it on MAMP on my Mac, and it also runs on WAMPServer, for development.

Last year I created a membership style site in Joomla using Mighty Extensions for a bed and breakfast listing service (http://uurehome.com). Mighty User and Membership was enough, this adds custom user fields and subscription plans. You do have to pay for Mighty Extensions. Payment for the B&B listings is done thru Paypal, Mighty Membership enables this.

The subscription plan feature is Mighty Membership is very good. You can have length of time, cost renewals, renewal nag messages. Could have written myself, but why at this cost :-)

Joomla can certainly handle the community side of a non-profit site, there's the usual assortment of content, discussions, news feeds and so on. It's also ok for mere mortals to administer.

Not so sure about comparing to Orchard, as I haven't kicked the tires on Orchard. I have done enterprise web CMS for a living in the past, so I am used to evaluating these sorts of products. Orchard looks similar to Joomla in how it works, based on the screenshots I see in the docs. One thing I will say with confidence is that it's easier to standup Joomla (or something LAMP/WAMP/MAMP) than on the MS Webmatrix. However, if you already have a Webmatrix provider, then it's similar. Said by someone that has done a bunch of IIS and pretty much all the web technologies going back to the beginning of time (that's 1993).

Another aspect of using Joomla for me in this project, which is for a small business, was knowing that there's a bunch of Joomla knowledgable web design shops this owner could use if I stop helping her. While I am not going to say there isn't a base of folks doing web design that are doing Orchard, my sense is that its much smaller than Joomla. This is a factor for me in helping non-profits, churches and so on, not leaving them in a place where I am the "only" person that could keep whatever it is running. Still, if there's even a couple of local web design shops that do Orchard, I'd say that's enough to feel comfortable.

Krid
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For a non profit organization it is unlikely to maintain a costly server where LAMP stack has both low cost server and some decent CMS which meets your requirements perfectly. Some of them are :

  1. Drupal
  2. Joomla
  3. WordPress

Any of them are highly extensible, got a great community support , plenty of themes and modules readily available and you can get awesome things for free though there are some paid once too.

And if you want my recommendation i would go for Drupal as it provides :

  1. Build in role management service.
  2. Very matured and friendly community.
  3. Great scalabilty.
  4. Secured out of the box
  5. And some more .......

Hope that adds a new dimension to your search :)

Best of luck

MD. Sahib Bin Mahboob
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We built http://aclj.org on Orchard with a custom membership implementation within to support millions of members. We do form processing through Kimbia for donations and petition signatures. We're very happy with the implementation and feel that Orchard worked out well for us as a platform. It is VERY extensible and we developed 32 custom modules in-house.

Chris Bower
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I would recommend wordpress for your requirement.

Advantages: 1. More forum support. 2. Easy to learn. 3. Very less server cost to host the site. 4. You will have N number of plugins and widgets etc...

Hope It gives some sense :)

Naveen
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