Oqtane - First Impressions

Oqtane, in their own words... Oqtane is an open source and cross-platform CMS and application framework for building modern digital experiences on .NET.

I have recently discovered that I may have an opportunity to do some work involving Oqtane, so I figured I'd give it a try. After spending a good number of hours working with it the past two days, I figured I'd share some initial thoughts.

Short Version: It's Great

I've been meaning to migrate to a more focused web-presence, working on blogging more frequently and combining the blog with my personal site and portfolio to give a sort of all-in-one experience, but I wasn't entirely sure the best route to take with that. WordPress, spin up something in React, old trusty Python and Flask or Django... nothing seemed to be perfect for my needs, however. Within a few hours of futzing with Oqtane, I made my decision to migrate to it. It's a very powerful framework but it's very intuitive to use and I can scale up to more functionality if I decide to. If not, it's still perfect for what I need it to do: host a blog, host my portfolio, and generally serve up all the delicious, delicious content you see in front of you.

But it's not perfect...

The ecosystem is great, but so far it seems theming and modules available from the marketplace are a bit sparse. This comes with the caveat that I haven't explored too deeply, but just in general the options don't seem all that numerous, yet. I've also noticed some of the marketplace themes and modules to be a bit... finicky.

The upside of that

On the other hand, this seeming lack of modules and theming makes me excited to really dive in to the ecosystem more, and I'm already thinking of some ideas for custom modules to spin up, and I'm definitely going to consider working on my own theme or at least customizing some of the available options to suit my needs. And it's really not that sparse, just not as mind-blowingly full-featured as it could be. (WordPress has 59k plugins, to about 100 modules/themes for Oqtane.) One caveat to this is some of modules seem to be very feature-rich with at least one of them considered a full CMS in itself: I'll have to do more exploring.

In The End

I think Oqtane is a wonderful bit of software, that suits my needs well. I can't wait to dive more into the ecosystem and see what I can create!