What is Reddit's opinion of Umbraco?

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Any good CMS would be able to handle functionality like this pretty easily.

If you're looking to go down the PHP route the best choice out there is Concrete5. There are others out there with great community support and ease of use, but most of them are starting to feel their age or aren't suited for a site with rich functionality. A lot of new developers will direct you towards WordPress, but for real development it can be very hacky to get something that isn't suited to a blog working. Modern day CMS's are far superior.

If you're not tied to PHP I can highly recommend Umbraco on ASP.NET. Again, ASP.NET has a number of decent alternatives that will get the job done, but Umbraco is currently the best open-source CMS out there, and with its recent move to the ASP.NET MVC framework it will be the better CMS for .NET users for a while.

Ruby/Python devs would be better suited when pointing out a CMS on their platform. To my knowledge there isn't a mature and dominant CMS solution for either. The many Python frameworks out there are great, but you'll have to roll your own to get something useful.

CMS is kind of the same way. There are a ton of existing options that you can use, unless you need something unique. http://www.orchardproject.net/ and http://umbraco.com/ are the two most popular .NET-based CMS solutions.

What scale are we talking about? 400 pages is still on the low-end scale.

If you're strictly aiming to use PHP then I would definitely go with Concrete5 over anything else as it is the most user-friendly CMS I've seen on the PHP platform as most others are quite dated. However, if you were willing to go over to ASP.NET or had experience with ASP.NET Umbraco is probably the best CMS I've worked with.

If I were started a project then I'd start on a framework instead of a CMS or blogging platform, otherwise you'll find yourself constrained to addons and/or functionality not acting like how you require. Also, many new projects tend to be edging away from PHP and choosing either to go with .NET, Python or Ruby. I would strongly recommend starting out with a cleaner language/framework if you're starting fresh.

If I were to go down the CMS route I'd have to go for .NET and I'd have to choose Umbraco. It powers a number of large-scale sites, it's open-source and it's incredibly developer friendly.

If you're against .NET, then I'd probably use Python if starting fresh, and use a framework like Django. With either of these choices you're starting on a great framework with two fantastic, leading languages.

I use Umbraco for my personal site, and I use it mainly to toy with different ways of building things. I'm currently toying with a way to export my site into flat files on publish so I can host them elsewhere.

Yeah I can see that being a pain, I am just building a set of powershell scripts to sync live onto staging... Have you tried Courier for syncing the changes?

It depends which language you're looking at, but for .NET Umbraco gets my vote. It's open-source and gives the developer ultimate flexibility. I use it in a global agency so feel free to ask me any questions.

Do you have any preferences in regards to language, ie. do you write C#/Python/Ruby code daily? Then you might want to look into something else than Wordpress, if you want to leverage those skills down the the line.

So if you write C# I would probably recommend http://umbraco.com/ and then look into some of the starter kits to get you up and running: https://our.umbraco.org/projects/?category=Starter%20Kits

> Ive just started with .net mvc and was wondering if you had to use some kind of backend interface at all/ how do you deal with it?

Nope, nothing out of the box. .NET MVC is really a framework and not a platform.

If you are looking to do eCommerce or CMS type stuff and don't want to roll your own, there are numerous platforms (both free and otherwise) available. For eCommerce, nopCommerce is getting pretty popular for small-ish businesses, and Umbraco is a feature-rich and easy to use CMS.

I take it that you're mostly interested in web development, or at least, that your primary goal is to learn C# and ASP.NET, not just C#. So my answer focuses on that.

I would recommend that you start with an ASP.NET MVC project. Grab Visual Studio Community and create an ASP.NET Web application, using the MVC template. You can start out by simply putting the majority of your backend code in your views (.cshtml files), which should look pretty familiar to you as a PHP programmer, as they're simply HTML files with C# code mixed in. This page will teach you all you need to know about the Razor syntax, which is what you'll be using when you're editing cshtml files.

If you want, you can also check out the other tutorials in that series, although I recommend that you don't use WebMatrix - develop with an MVC project in Visual Studio instead. Sure, you won't be doing actual MVC programming, but you can still build good websites this way, and it'll set you up in such a way that transitioning to MVC will be easy. You also get to use Visual Studio, so you'll hopefully discover why so many developers love VS so much.

Once you've got a solid understanding of how C# and ASP.NET work, there are plenty of other things you can explore. Take a look at Umbraco if you want a good CMS that doesn't interfere with your code, or take a look at MVC if you're looking for a way to keep your backend code clean while writing large web applications.

I'd suggest learning Umbraco if you're a .NET guy. Lots of companies use it.

As far as front-end. These are useful things I picked up companies are looking for in a recent job search.

Angular, Backbone, and friends

SCSS, Saas, Less

Bootstrap, unfortunately noone was using Foundation :(

SVG manipulation

Bower, Grunt, Gulp

Good luck with your foray into developer world :)

P.S. If you ever need advice, I have a similar background as far as .NET and Front End, so feel free to reach out

You could look into DotNetNuke, or Umbraco if you want something for free. I don't see the point in using Wordpress if everybody is familiar with Windows. Seems like it would introduce a pointless learning curve.

As has been recommended, a CMS like Wordperss is your best bet and .NET has a couple good ones in Orchard and Umbraco. Since you are already familiar with C#, they should be relatively easy to pick up.

Are you limited to PHP? If the option is there I always recommend Umbraco as a CMS for lightweight sites.

If you are restricted to PHP Concrete5 is a great CMS that may be able to help.

Decent enough CMS, not that you will find many CMS platforms that stand out over others now-a-days anyway. But if you are thinking of moving, http://umbraco.com/ is worth a shot. It's another .NET-based CMS (since I assume your hosting is .NET if you are using Kentico) but it's open source, released under the MIT license.

A quick google search took me to Hotscripts and it seems they have a couple solutions.

Have you considered using a CMS to build the site? I use Umbraco at the job. Very developer friendly. I've never used it's blogging feature, but I know you can choose to include the blog feature upon installation.

Also, you could consider running wordpress in it's own directory.

If you're looking towards ASP.NET then Umbraco is a fantastic CMS with a great community and fantastic support across the Internet. The new versions are also looking very exciting, especially how they're differentiating themselves from other solutions by switching to MVC.