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.
Hi Rich,
A really good analysis. You’ve almost got everything right. But I do not agree with your conclusion. That’s the first impression: Sitecore is for “big boys”. Well, it is not. Sitecore has huge performance problems with bigger sites. The beautiful GUI for the editors is a pain in the a**, Sitecores goes down very often, leaving the user with one option: shut IE down via Windows Task Manager.
Many of the features are working as long as you keep it small, few items, otherwise you are in big trouble.
If not implemented 100% right, you will not have time to enjoy the site, but rather you’ll spend it looking at some big log files (> 45 MB) a day. And you really need a geek or at least one man full time dedicated to maintain Sitecore.
And speaking about the lousy client, well they are only working in IE and a verry small part in Firefox.
Well, I could go on, but I will stop here. I’ve also learned this the hard way and even had to change job to escape this nightmare Sitecore is.
Congrats for you analysis. I wonder if the Sitecore guys had read it.
Thanks for your comments. I appreciate your insight. Sitecore is touted as being a highly scalable solution; however my Sitecore experience with large-scale websites is limited. So I’m not sure what to expect when you have dozens of authors and editors using a variety of desktop computers and internet connections working on a busy large-scale enterprise portal.
The folks at Sitecore spent so much energy developing that beautiful windows-like desktop and related sub-applications that sit on it, but they failed with basic usability on so many levels. It’s like they failed to see the forest through the trees. Not all business-users have a T1 and a Duo-core machine. On one hand I am impressed with their desktop (as an engineer loving cool technology); but on the other hand I hate it for performance, usability, and buggyness. Developers are required to use this desktop to build the website; however for simple websites you can hide the desktop from the business user and only show them a customized webedit view.
It would be interesting to chat with you over a cup of coffee and exchange war stories.
I temper my conclusion based upon your input. I will continue to post about my Sitecore experience as I see fit. Thanks!
I must say that I concur 100% in that analysis.
But I do not think that it matters that the developer interface in sitecore sucks. Most SC developers uses Visual Studio… at least I do.. I only use the Developer interface to create the initial files.. (xsl etc…)
What really, really annoys me is the system requirements. I like developing on my laptop… but it is painfully slow to debug and everything… the IIS process alone takes around 300MB ram. Combine that with having VS and SQL server running….it is really slow…and if you are connecting to a SQl server not on your computer… forget it.
I do like the architecture alot, and the ideas are really good. The connection of XSL sheets with data is great and very easy to figure out for a developer…and I like the fact that there is absolutely no design limits..
But it’s meant to be a development framework I guess. I think it needs alot of tuning here performance wise…it slows your production if you have to wait for system every time you make a little change.
Backward compatibility (tried upgrading from 5.2 to 5.3) also needs a serious double check. At least there were som packages that I was unable to transfer…:(