Recommend an ASP-based Portal

My colleague is planning to put up a portal and I offered to help. Since I'm not familiar with PHP, only with ASP, I need your help guys in selecting the best ASP-based portal software. Free license is preferred but would consider commercial if price is ok.

Thanks in advance.

 

Do you work with ASP.Net at all?

If so, SharePoint would be a good choice

 

A shame really as I could only work with Classic ASP. Wanted for a long time to learn .NET but didn't have the time to do so. But I'll check SharePoint anyway. Thanks!

 

Try SOOP. Nice classic-ASP CMS with plenty of modules and built in Forum. Runs a little slow, so be sure to have a host with enough horsepower.

 

Thanks dude. Unfortunately, SOOP is currently not available for download due to some issues.

 

have you tried maxwebportal? i have used it nearly 6 years ago . it was a portal made with classic asp

 

Really? Wow. Been away from it all longer than I thought. Guess it's true what they say... once you've tried PHP, you'll never go back.

 

I been wanting to learn PHP but never had the time to do it. I guess I really should start teaching myself PHP.

Yup. Seen it. Evaluating it right now. Thanks!

 

So here's what I got so far. Hopefully some folks would benefit from this post especially those looking for a portal solution to get their soon-to-be launched portal site.

Since I'm more familiar with ASP, I preferred having the portal code written in ASP and here's what I found:

1. MWPX or Max Web Portal Next
   
   Not a bad portal solution based on Snitz Forums. However, I find MWPX not 100% standards compliant as it still use tables for its layout. Theming will be difficult.
   
   
2. SOOP Portal
   
   Holds a reputation as one of the best portal ASP-based solution. However, due to an issue with WWF (Web Whiz Forums) changing its licensing, the SOOP developers are forced to come up with a new forum code for the portal. Presently, there's no ETA for the new release of SOOP and the current version is not available for download.
   
   
3. iPortalX
   
   A commercial portal solution based on the WWF forum code but has much features and improvements over MWPX and SOOP. Several licensees have come up with nice themes. However, due to WWF, again, the developers are forced to increase the license to cover WWF's license costs.
   

PHP-based portal/CMS:

1. Drupal
   
   One of the best open-source CMS solution written in PHP. Great features and highly customizable. A lot of professional-looking themes are available. Hundreds of modules are available to add functionalities to the base code. The only downside is the forum code which lacks features common to most forum solutions like vBulletin, PHPBB and SMF. If you plan of having a site set-up that is not forum-centric, go for Drupal.
   
   
2. Joomla!
   
   Drupal's no. 1 competition. It's forum is based on JoomlaBoard which is almost comparable to other popular forum solutions like vBulletin, PHPBB and SMF. However, on the CMS side, Drupal is better. Themes are limited and most aren't free.
   

So basically, I'm back to square one. I decided to further delay the launching of the site and hope that there will be favorable developments in the coming days or weeks.


@deadweight
Thanks for mentioning PHP. Because of that, I discovered Drupal and Joomla! Since I'm very new to PHP, it took me hours just to modify module codes. I feel that more than five years of life is wasted on learning and perfecting my ASP programming skills. Anyway, better late than never. Reps for you.

 

Glad you're looking at new options. Don't be too afraid of either Joomla or Drupal simply because you're new to php. I'm still unbelievably green to raw php coding... but really need to do very little of it with these cms packages since the sheer volume of modules available covers just about everything you'd need.

For the most part... if I'm creating a content-heavy site, I go with one of the PHP packages. If I know it will require quite a bit of custom coding, I still stick with ASP or .NET Nuke or something like that.

 

A portal is such a simple thing, why don't you custom make your own?

 

I was actually excited when I started to tinker Drupal's code. However, I found out that the code is already abstracted, i.e., to extend/modify the code, I need to utilize the APIs. Problem is, not only that I need to learn PHP but be familiar with Drupal's APIs as well.

I agree. It's easy, just set-up a bunch of <divs> in the layout, extract the records from the database and you got a portal page. Did that twice already. But why re-invent the wheel and spend time and effort if there are solutions already available that offers more functionalities?

Right now, I'm considering using MegaBBS for the forum front-end and do the portal pages by myself as a last resort.