CrownPeak is a Difficult Development Environment

The development environment is sub-par. It's difficult to create any type of "application" as the format of page templates is not suited for compile-time checks, cross classes, and many .NET libraries are excluded. You cannot use modern development techniques such as SASS for CSS, nor does their system minify or bundle JavaScript or CSS. There is no place for a standard relational database so creating "category" pages of related content is difficult. There is no source control integration. Again. No source control history or usage whatsoever. Also, a real difficulty in development is the code-deploy-wait model used - it's similar to SharePoint in that a developer makes a change to a template, saves, and then needs to "deploy" that change to another server to view it. The deployment usually takes from seconds to minutes. This makes development take a lot longer than other platforms where the feedback is more immediate.

The content creation user experience is very confusing. For instance, there is a "new" menu for creating content but the developers control of that is limited and end users often get lost in a large development template folder looking for the "right" template to use. Other content creation systems like Wordpress are a lot more intuitive.

The documentation and online forum are particularly lacking. The documentation does not have many examples and the forum is extremely cumbersome and limited. Most of the "help" documentation is sideways Powerpoints. CrownPeak makes up for this with their support email system - they respond very quickly - but it's very hard to look up anything for yourself.