I was unsure wether to reach out to the community or Umbraco directly, but ultimately figured the people here might have a wider range of experiences.
We're not exactly running a hosting service, but it's the easiest way to describe it. Our company offers point of sales hardware and software to the service industry. An additional service we offer our customers for free is a very basic website. Currently we create a template for each customer and then give them a login so they can add/edit content using a CMS we developed/adapted (I believe it's mostly powered by RadEditor). The biggest problems we have with the CMS is that it hasn't aged well (no options for fluid content unless you fuss with the HTML), and just isn't intuitive for regular people. And if I'm being honest, it's even cumbersome for designers and developers to use too.
Because of this we're wanting to revamp or replace our customers' CMS with something module-base. Mostly we'll be using modules that fetch data from our systems, such as opening hours, contact info and employee bios. But our customers will also require the possibility to add a bit of custom content, such as a little text (simple editor) and images (galleries, slideshows, etc.)
Umbraco was recommended to us for an unrelated project because it uses ASP.NET and all our other services do too. I haven't seen anyone else use Umbraco for this type of thing, as I believe this kind of service is rather unusual, not to mention a little challenging to ressearch. So it's unclear to me if this is even something the platform could do. Essentially we'd have one Umbraco setup - customised and integrated into our system to fetch data from our customers - and then isolated areas where each customer can go in and use the Umbraco CMS we've set up for them to edit their own small set of pages. From what I read, it doesn't seem like Umbraco had been built with this kind of use in mind.
Has anyone had any experience using it for something similar? Or has an inkling if this can be done? I don't really need specifics - I'll leave that to our developers - but any pointers indicating how/if it's possible would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Sarah
Umbraco would definitely be capable of achieving what you want here.
It's not clear if you want one CMS with multiple sites controlled in the admin of it, or many individual sites which each have their own CMS. Either I've done both using Umbraco. Regarding the custom text properties, that is one of Umbraco's selling points, it's so easy to add custom properties and display them in your template.
Thanks so much for your answer, this is very good to know. We'd need individual sites with their own CMS and a personal login to access it. All of our customers would have an identical CMS interface, but they'd each have their own set of webpages. Does this mean we'll need to set up a new Umbraco installation for each website, or would it be possible to run all of these through the same installation? The later would obviously be a lot easier for us to manage and apply improvements or changes to down the line.
If anyone else has used Umbraco for something similar, I'd be happy to hear about your experiences too. :)
From my experience it would be better to have them as individual sites with their own builds. You could create a central site with re-usable features that you can put into a package and install onto the other sites.
Using Umbraco as part of a hosting service
I was unsure wether to reach out to the community or Umbraco directly, but ultimately figured the people here might have a wider range of experiences.
We're not exactly running a hosting service, but it's the easiest way to describe it. Our company offers point of sales hardware and software to the service industry. An additional service we offer our customers for free is a very basic website. Currently we create a template for each customer and then give them a login so they can add/edit content using a CMS we developed/adapted (I believe it's mostly powered by RadEditor). The biggest problems we have with the CMS is that it hasn't aged well (no options for fluid content unless you fuss with the HTML), and just isn't intuitive for regular people. And if I'm being honest, it's even cumbersome for designers and developers to use too.
Because of this we're wanting to revamp or replace our customers' CMS with something module-base. Mostly we'll be using modules that fetch data from our systems, such as opening hours, contact info and employee bios. But our customers will also require the possibility to add a bit of custom content, such as a little text (simple editor) and images (galleries, slideshows, etc.)
Umbraco was recommended to us for an unrelated project because it uses ASP.NET and all our other services do too. I haven't seen anyone else use Umbraco for this type of thing, as I believe this kind of service is rather unusual, not to mention a little challenging to ressearch. So it's unclear to me if this is even something the platform could do. Essentially we'd have one Umbraco setup - customised and integrated into our system to fetch data from our customers - and then isolated areas where each customer can go in and use the Umbraco CMS we've set up for them to edit their own small set of pages. From what I read, it doesn't seem like Umbraco had been built with this kind of use in mind.
Has anyone had any experience using it for something similar? Or has an inkling if this can be done? I don't really need specifics - I'll leave that to our developers - but any pointers indicating how/if it's possible would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Sarah Umbraco would definitely be capable of achieving what you want here. It's not clear if you want one CMS with multiple sites controlled in the admin of it, or many individual sites which each have their own CMS. Either I've done both using Umbraco. Regarding the custom text properties, that is one of Umbraco's selling points, it's so easy to add custom properties and display them in your template.
Paul
Thanks so much for your answer, this is very good to know. We'd need individual sites with their own CMS and a personal login to access it. All of our customers would have an identical CMS interface, but they'd each have their own set of webpages. Does this mean we'll need to set up a new Umbraco installation for each website, or would it be possible to run all of these through the same installation? The later would obviously be a lot easier for us to manage and apply improvements or changes to down the line.
If anyone else has used Umbraco for something similar, I'd be happy to hear about your experiences too. :)
From my experience it would be better to have them as individual sites with their own builds. You could create a central site with re-usable features that you can put into a package and install onto the other sites.
Thanks for the tip :)
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