In 2011, I joined a web design company called NonprofitCMS. Our primary focus was creating websites for non-profit organizations and membership associations using platforms such as Wordpress, Drupal, and Sitefinity. Over time, we honed our skills in building large-scale websites with extensive content libraries, many of which contained thousands of pieces of content.

During the years 2011-2013, Sitefinity was at its peak in popularity. However, the platform has since fallen out of favor due to its niche appeal and high cost as a commercial product, while Wordpress continues to dominate the market.

One of the main issues we faced with Sitefinity was its slow performance. While I can only speak to my experience with the platform at the time, it became increasingly slow, to the point where we had to completely overhaul its storage engine to improve its speed and functionality.

Another major issue we encountered was the need for extensive integrations with other platforms commonly used by non-profit associations. For instance, we had to build single sign-on functionality with various platforms like iMIS, Netforum, Personify, Higher Logic, among others. This required a significant amount of custom work, ultimately leading us to customize the Sitefinity platform to the point where the only feature we still used out of the box was the page builder.

Eventually, we sold NonprofitCMS and moved on to other endeavors. However, I remained troubled by the lack of an alternative to Sitefinity that was optimized for association-style websites, flexible enough to build integrations, and most importantly, free and open source. This drove us to create Raytha, a platform that fulfills these needs and allows organizations to build powerful, customizable websites with ease on .NET.

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