Choosing open source vs. proprietary CMS

Posted by jkneip on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by jkneip
Published on 2011-02-05T21:26:27Z Indexed on 2011/02/05 23:33 UTC
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Hi-

I've been tasked with redesigning a website for a small academic library. While only in charge of the site for 6 months, we've been maintaining static html pages edited in Dreamweaver for years. Last count of our total pages is around 400. Our university is going with an enterprise level solution called Sitefinity, although we maintain our own domain and are responsible to maintain our own presense.

Some background-my library has a couple Microsoft IIS servers on which this static html site has been running. I'm advocating for the implementation of a CMS while doing this redesign. The problem is I'm basically the lone webmaster so I have no one to agree or disagree with my choice. There are also only 1-2 content editors right know for the site but a CMS could change that factor.

I would like to use the functionality of having servers that run .NET and MS SQL but am more experience setting up and maintaining open source software like Wordpress or Drupal on web hosts. My main concern is choosing a CMS that will be easy to update / maintain / deal with upgrades (i.e., support) in case I'm not there in the future.

So I'm wondering how to factor in the open source CMS vs. a relatively inexpensive commercial CMS decision and whether choosing PHP/MySQL vs. ASP.net framework for development environment will play into my decision.

Thanks for any input that can be offered based on the details I've given.

Thanks,

Jason

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