Sep 30 2007
Sitecore [v5.3] — The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The Good:
- Built with native ASP.NET V2.0, C#, XML, and XSLT
- An excellent and well documented API
- A highly customizable system built upon an open development platform
- An active developer network with a responsive online forum
- A beautiful Windows-like desktop delivered over the web to your browser…with ribbon menus, smooth gradations, dimensional icons, and right-click context menus. This fancy interface is used to build and manage the website and it’s content by both developers and business users.
- Handles multiple languages well
- Good cache control and excellent front-end performance
- Good support for Web Standards
- Highly granular security control
- Customizable workflow
The Bad:
- Poor plugin [modules] architecture. What modules are available, are typically painful to install, and almost impossible to uninstall; and further more, many of the modules are buggy and poorly implemented.
- Out-of-the-box, Sitecore provides almost no Website/CMS functionality. You’ll have to build everthing, templates, layouts, navigation element, etc. As I said in a previous post “Sitecore is not a CMS, it’s a framework to build a CMS”.
- The beautiful Windows-like desktop is massively heavy which requires a high bandwidth connection and powerful desktop equipment.
- The developer interface is anything but intuitive, it’s complex, confusing, and sometimes buggy. It has serious usability issues…it’s designed by geeks for geeks. I love the core architectual concepts of Sitecore (templates, masters, layouts, renderings, etc) and how websites are constructed using these concepts; however, building a website through this interface is frustrating to say the least. Fortunately, the business user interface can be customized and simplified to be more usable and somewhat intuative.
- Managing security on large websites can be painfully difficult for developers and insane for business users.
The Ugly:
- A massive footprint. An out-of-the-box install will consume 543 MB of disk space with 24,057 files and 587 folders; also the system requires 6 databases. After this massive install, hit the website with a browser only to be greeted with a single blank white web-page page with the black text “Sitecore Welcome to Sitecore”.
- The administration side of this system is extremely heavy for web delivery. With beautiful graphics driven with Ajax, Sitecore gives the impression of Windows desktop which leads you to expect certain level of behavior and performance which simply the system can not fully deliver.
- Creating and managing multiple independentwebsites is a complete nightmare with or without the multi-site manager. Forget it; it’s not worth the pain. In-spite of what the folks at Sitcore might say, Sitecore is NOT a very good multi-site system – I learned this the hard way.
Conclusion:
After evaluating dozens of systems available on the market, Sitecore does in fact standout as being one of the better systems for many reasons. However, this system does have its place in your tool belt and is certainly not recommended for all types of websites. Sitecore is best suited for a large corporate portals, or institution websites, etc. Larger scale projects with many authors and editors requiring workflow. Sitecore can work well for multiple relatedwebsites which can share management function, templates, layouts, security, etc. I personal would not recommend Sitecore for small business brochureware websites or anything small scale, where simplicity is an important factor…Sitecore might work; but its a huge overkill.