Episerver CMS is a great product – and it’s been built with the minds of developers at its forefront throughout. That makes it distinct from some other products on the market. Yet my CV has ‘Episerver developer’ written on it, and I want to change this.
With the right guidance, your organisation does not need to hire specialised Episerver developers. A C# Developer will do.
Are you working with Episerver CMS in an current or upcoming project? Maybe you’re an implementation partner on the agency side and have an upcoming Episerver project, or perhaps you’re an organisation with the tools and developers in-house, and need some guidance if this is new to you.
Five reasons a seasoned C# developer will do
Your organisation does not need to hire specialist Episerver developers. A C# developer, with particular experience in building websites utilising the ASP.Net MVC framework whilst adhering to modern best practices, can quickly become that ‘Episerver specialist’ developer your organisation needs.
See the reasons below as to-why
1. The SDK is fantastic
The Episerver SDK doesn’t re-invent the wheel like some other enterprise CMS products tend to do.
- It’s written in C#, and follows SOLID principles
- Built to fully adhere to the MVC design pattern
- Utilises industry standard practices – such as code first migrations behind the scenes.
In addition, the cloud-hosted infrastructure:
- Uses Azure – and does so in a neat-and-tidy manner
- Consists of a simple and effective deployment processes and pipelines – with the added bonus of the Deployment API which was introduced recently.
This isn’t ‘reinvent the wheel‘ stuff. Any seasoned back-end developer who has experience in building websites utilising the ASP.Net MVC framework (so most of them), and does-so by following industry-standard practices and modern design patterns, will be able to onboard onto your project very quickly with just a little bit of guidance.
2. The Community
Episerver has a great developer community. There are developers all over the world fighting to become an ‘EMVP‘ – and this means that they are doing their upmost to help any fellow developers who are in trouble.
If you get stuck with something – and you can’t find any help for it online (which is extremely unlikely btw) – then drop a post into the Episerver World forum explaining your problem. The community is great, and someone will normally get back to you pretty quickly.
And if that’s not enough, Episerver have dedicated support and expert services teams who you can get help from too.
3. The Academy
I started my life as a graduate developer at a digital agency up north, and I remember they put me through the Episerver development training course and got me involved in support. A week later I’d already built, tested and deployed some new Episerver code to a leading brand – which was quite intimating as a graduate!
The academy courses have improved significantly in recent years – being an Episerver employee means I get to have a look at them from time-to-time – but heck, with the great documentation, most developers won’t even need this.
4. The Documentation
Episerver has lots of free developer guides which will get you up and running in no time.
The documentation is well maintained, relevant and kept up-to-date.
The CMS developer guide will talk you through how to get a local development environment up and running quickly, and will take you through the fundamentals of utilising the content provider with detailed examples and information.
They also run regular campaigns, like the recent come back stronger campaign which provided many premium CMS development courses for free!
5. The Simplicity
The setup and configuration with Episerver CMS isn’t that difficult. The difficulties that often come from most software development projects tend to be related to some business logic that sits outside of the responsibility of the CMS.
Want to create a new Episerver Page type? As a minimum, you simply require the standard pillars of any solution that follows the MVC architecture: a model, a view, and a controller. And if it’s a simple page type, you probably won’t even need a controller.
Run the solution and you’ll see your newly added page type available to you in the Episerver CMS UI.
You describe the behaviour of your content models via attributes and data types in code – no need to go into any kind of administration suite and do any configuration or setup tasks. Told you it was developer friendly.
Summary
If you approach a C# developer and ask them “hey, you wanna get involved in some Episerver CMS development?”, they would be a fool to turn down the opportunity.
Don’t focus your headhunt on someone who has specific experience in Episerver – you should broaden your range to find a general C# developer who is clued-up on best practices.
In a nutshell; if a developer knows C# ASP.Net MVC, it won’t take them long to get to grips with Episerver CMS.
And vice-versa. If someone is an Episerver developer, it doesn’t mean they only know how to code up Episerver websites too.