Given our growing investment in Blazor, our company is on the way to build expertise, tools and obviously libraries and building blocks to accelerate the development of Blazor solutions first of all internally. Since a few days we are toying with Oqtane, a new application/website framework to quickly build Blazor-based solutions, developed by Shaun Walker. People that have been in the .NET ecosystem long enough will probably remember this name as Shaun was the developer of DotNetNuke, by far the most popular CMS framework back in the early 2000s. Community Starter Kit and Portal Starter Kit were offered as open-source software to build respectively a community site and a portal website using C#, VB.NET and even J#. At that time, PHP already had its own free CMS systems and one of the most famous was PHPNuke, hence the name DotNetNuke, the .NET version of PHPNuke.
DotNetNuke legacy
Shaun Walker did a very good job building a CMS which was very solid and very easy to extend. As with most of the .NET-based CMS systems, DNN had a few very good modules and it also developed a pretty big ecosystem of developers providing paid modules, but .NET’s life in building portals was short-lived because of WebForms technology, which proved not suitable to build SEO-friendly websites.
While Microsoft fixed that by providing a new development model for ASP.NET, based on MVC like most PHP CMS, it didn’t care too much about enabling .NET developers to build websites. When MVC arrived, PHP-based solutions like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc. were already very popular and they had lots of extensions, modules, themes, while Microsoft didn’t care about that market that much and basically left the .NET developers on their own. WebForms-based solutions became suitable mostly for enterprise portals, which probably was Microsoft’s goal since the beginning, and while improvements like URL rewriting had been added to WebForms, that technology never became popular for standard websites.
Walker claims that DNN had been installed over 700k times, and I’m pretty sure that figure is not far from being accurate. At the time, I had multiple installations of DNN running and my company was actively developing for it. Being WebForms-based, DNN became quite popular for enterprise applications (I personally used it for many solutions, even banks), but the lack of support from Microsoft prevented such tools from getting widespread usage. The DotNetNuke company is now out of Walker’s control, but he and others came back with a new adaptation of that concept based on WebForms’ successor: Blazor.
Blazor is gaining a lot of traction, it is brilliant and it has mostly addressed those issues that made WebForms so uncomfortable to deal with, even if Blazor also uses Javascript to do its magic. Microsoft avoided the usual mistakes, though, and it enabled Blazor to adapt to basically any scenario, especially when dealing with SEO which is crucial for corporate websites.
Today, companies have reached very high ranking (94-95/100) on Lighthouse SEO using Blazor.
Why should Microsoft challenge WordPress?
When Microsoft had fixed the issues in WebForms to make it more SEO-friendly, the ship had sailed away and developers had already decided that the technology was not suitable for websites. The Web was quite different at that time: websites were a lot simpler while Microsoft had a big technology that was ideal to build enterprise applications requiring a lot of interactions. Internet connections were much slower and many .NET developers didn’t actually care to optimize WebForms for speed.
Today, you can easily find websites using images whose size is even several MBs, but much faster networks have made such issues less relevant. Most websites at the time required very few interactions with users while backends were becoming fatter and more powerful. Several PHP CMS systems were becoming popular and WordPress emerged as the leader that today powers about 30% of all available websites, i.e., hundreds of millions. However, websites changed as well, because Internet connections became faster and supported much more complex interactions. Frameworks like WordPress grew a lot, they provide a lot of functionalities both on the frontend and the backend, they started using Javascript much more than they did in the past, and they evolved into applications that are usually made of 10-20k files or more.
You could say that Microsoft was 20 years ahead of its time and its web technologies would find more widespread usage today than they did in the past! In fact, Microsoft had to re-invent WebForms, even after they deprecated it by refusing to bring the technology to .NET Core. In the meantime, a typical WordPress installation is now made of 10-15 plugins, it has to download tens of Javascript files, fonts, CSS files, it connects to external APIs to get data, it has to refresh data on the pages by using HTTP requests and it has to do a lot of other things. Then in the backend you have many more modules: WYSIWYG editors, modules to post to social network accounts, AI and more.
They are not simple websites anymore, they evolved into complex applications with lots of dependencies and lots of code to run and there’s a big ecosystem of plugins, themes and other extensions. Yet, PHP didn’t change much. One of the complaints that many developers in the early 2000s were addressing to ASP.NET was that it was “complicated”: what are those “events”? Why can’t I just mix code and HTML markup in my files? Classes? Polymorphism? PHP was much simpler especially for the new class of developers that grew up with the Web but now PHP has changed too.
It will probably never be a true enterprise development framework but it had to bring all those standards that .NET had 20 years ago. Developing a module for WordPress is much more difficult now, not for the casual developer. This market is made of developers earning millions with themes, plugins and dealing with a somewhat inconsistent framework made of the WordPress PHP code, code from external plugins, themes, Javascript, CSS files and a lot more.
This is no 2008 anymore.
WordPress in-fighting
This is also a very difficult time for the WordPress ecosystem, given the in-fighting that arose between WordPress original developer Auttomatic and companies like WPEngine. I won’t enter much into details as this is a whole chapter per se, where open-source companies are discovering that their business model doesn’t work.
However, history has taught that once the in-fighting starts – especially if it happens because the original creator of an open-source project actually started the fight – it might not end in an easy way and it might damage the ecosystem a lot. We are not discussing a few personal issues here, but a war over revenues in the millions of dollars.
Something might happen, the ecosystem might fragment and users and customers – albeit they heavily invested in the platform – might look for an alternative that ensures some peace of mind.
I do not wish WordPress to fail, I’m just being a spectator here, but that fight might open some chances for a well-polished, modern framework that provides lots of functionalities and has solved most of its issues.
Why should Microsoft take this chance?
This is not about money, obviously. Microsoft doesn’t need more money.
However, Microsoft took care to open its technologies to many more developers and decided to bring the .NET framework to Linux as well a few years ago. According to what I see, that has been widely welcomed and .NET quickly became one of the leading frameworks on Linux as well. Not everything Microsoft, especially Nadella’s Microsoft, has done has been successful lately. On the contrary, I’d say that only a few of them have been successful besides the giant investment in AI, but .NET transition to being a multiplatform framework has been successful.
One of the key issues in losing the website market in the past was precisely that you had to use Windows (and host on Windows Server) to run .NET, and that increased the overall costs for developers used to spending zero or the like to host their website. That has now changed.
So the goal would not be money at all. The goal would be to bring more developers to the platform, a platform that could allow a developer to create a website, an API, a system service, an application for Windows or multi-platform (including iOS and Android), code for an IoT device, everything with the same set of knowledge. With the same framework.
And that would benefit Microsoft a lot.
What is Oqtane
Oqtane has been inspired by DotNetNuke and shares a lot with its ancestor in terms of concept and functionality. It is a Blazor-based application framework—a CMS of sorts—that includes all necessary building blocks to function like WordPress did. It provides essential features for a website-building framework: authentication, multi-site support, modules, themes, content management, authorization, user management, scheduled jobs, and an API.
It can be extended with custom .NET modules installed as NuGet packages, features a marketplace for modules and themes, and allows creating custom themes. Developers can extend the framework through custom modules or by modifying the open-source core.
Built on Blazor, it supports both Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly (WASM), static/interactive rendering, headless (API) deployments, and server pre-rendering for SEO optimization. It even integrates with .NET MAUI for hybrid app deployments
The theming system is very flexible, with a global theme that can be switched per page, and “containers” that basically act as styling units for modules so you can style each and every module on your page(s). There too, containers are global to a site but can then be customized per module so you can apply different styles to each module on a page.
Creating Flexbox themes for Oqtane is easy, and the platform also provides a simplified way to create your own theme or module by creating a whole solution for Visual Studio when Oqtane is in development mode. While it has some rough edges and its internal organization might look a little bit odd to a WordPress admin, it provides even more flexibility than the PHP solution.
It can also integrate powerhouses like the Syncfusion libraries for Blazor, which will instantly allow developers to use tens of modern and useful controls and widgets. And being based on .NET, Oqtane is fast. The actual speed depends on many factors, but Oqtane is fast and easy to optimize.
Note: I’m sure there are other CMS systems based on Blazor in the .NET ecosystem. We also developed a primitive PoC ourselves as a way to support our own development, and that’s basically why I looked for Oqtane. However, Oqtane basically supports all Blazor modes with a single platform. This is something very, very handy to consolidate around a single solution while being able to support basically all the Blazor complexity now that Microsoft has unified the framework. A big advantage.
What it would take
If Microsoft ever decides to exploit this chance, it also has an easy blueprint about what to do. It can simply do the opposite of what it did in the early 2000s (that is: nothing).
Blazor is brilliant and can be used to develop modern websites and applications. It is SEO-friendly, so you can simply learn a few rules to make your website SEO-compliant up to a very high degree (94-95 out of 100 on Lighthouse SEO). Oqtane is an application/website framework to build modern websites and it supports basically all the Blazor modes that Microsoft has plugged into the technology, which also means a very high degree of code reuse across many applications. Oqtane also supports multiple backends, from SQLite (that is, local) to SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL, so you can basically deploy a solution without using the expensive SQL Server.
A lot of companies are investing in creating Blazor controls and components: powerhouses like Syncfusion, Telerik and more, and even open-source projects like Radzen, MudBlazor, Blazorise are deploying beautiful components and controls that can act as building blocks for your applications, with modern widgets ranging from buttons to Kanban boards. Most of these widgets can be styled in a very easy way (CSS) and many of them encapsulate the functionalities of plugins that you would deploy on WordPress.
So what is the Blazor ecosystem missing in order to challenge WordPress? Basically, some of the most difficult modules to implement like payment system integrations, integrations with social networks and SaaS applications (Hubspot or Spotify and so on), a decent WYSIWYG editor on par with Elementor or Divi, an e-commerce system like WooCommerce and obviously 3 or 4 agencies that will start to develop modern and beautiful themes and plugins, with themes being the most important now.
In the past, WebForms has been a bet that was lost when the Web evolved in a different direction and integrating external systems was challenging and difficult. Integrating PayPal into a WebForms website was not impossible but was not as easy as integrating it into an MVC CMS. That has changed with Blazor, which has been designed to plug into the most modern Web technologies without hassle.
Microsoft has enough money to finance the evolution of a platform like Oqtane and support 3-4-5 big agencies to develop themes, modules and integrations. The multi-platform nature of .NET would allow developers to deploy on both Windows and Linux, which was a major obstacle with .NET Framework. Moreover, PHP popularity is shrinking and the language dropped from the 9th to 16th place in the TIOBE index while according to StackOverflow, PHP usage dropped from 30.7% in 2018 to 18.58% in 2023. Yet, PHP powers around 70% of the Internet websites mostly thanks to applications like WordPress, Magento, PrestaShop.
Microsoft would increase its popularity a lot by becoming a challenging player in the website market. It probably won’t replace WordPress, and that CMS would probably remain the leading CMS, but it would offer a true alternative and train many more developers to use .NET, which in turn would help prepare developers to use .NET in the enterprise segment, thus helping its popularity to grow even more.
