Hi,

I am currently partly involved in a project that is going to redesign (UI) and rewrite big parts of a complex external website. Currently the website is using a simple portal system written in .NET and is containing about 10 .NET applications that are integrated in the portal using frames.

Management has decided to switch to another portal/CMS system and to rewrite some of the old .NET applications. The new portal system they have chosen is SiteVision (swedish  CMS and java-based). Applications will be integrated using a reverse proxy portlet. A lot of functionality is also decided to be implemented by writing java portlets.

I have objected strongly to this new solution because of the following reasons:
* SiteVision is a poor CMS system, it has almost no separation between content and presentation and gives almost no control over the html rendered.
* The website we are building is not a mere content portal, it is a collection of strongly related applications with cross-cutting functionality
* Maintainability will be a nightmare when application logic, webcomponents and css will be duplicated and scattered over SiteVision, portlets and applications
* The reverse proxy process is not perfect and can be a bottleneck and limit some technical solutions

I feel that the best course of action would be to build a new main application and to rewrite some of the old applications in this main application and integrate the legacy ones using frames. And for content pages maybe use a content management API of some good CMS system. That way you would not lock the whole site to a CMS product, it would be easier to maintain and the technical limitations of the CMS would not limit development.

There are a number of CMS systems that seems to be more aimed at developing applications through, like EpiServer and SiteCore. Is there anyone with experience building applications using CMS products? I worried that the limitations and the friction is too big...

Any comments or  suggestions would be helpful :)