Does Ektron CMS400 support MVC architecture?

Question

The answer is both "yes" and "no". It depends on which features of Ektron you want to use.

Starting with version 8.5, Ektron has supported a 3-tier architecture, where the site and the Ektron WorkArea are on separate tiers and use WCF services to communicate. This is all transparent to you the developer unless you're writing super-custom stuff that requires your own web services. The 3-tier min site has a set of DLLs that give you the FrameworkAPI but under the hood use WCF to route all your API calls to the WorkArea tier.

However, when using MVC, you aren't able to use the "out-of-the-box" Ektron server controls, including the newer templated server controls. Depending on your requirements, this may not be an issue for you. I recently developed a non-PageBuilder site using Ektron 8.7 and MVC on the presentation tier. I had no problem using the API to get ContentData and then map it to a view model.

It's also possible to do a hybrid-style site that supports both MVC and ASPX pages - Scott Hanselman has a great blog post about exactly that (although his doesn't deal with Ektron per-se).

There's some info on the Ektron developer site about how to set up an MVC site so that aliases are handled correctly.

Finally, one big caveat worth mentioning is that PageBuilder is built around the concept of ASPX pages and user controls. If you require PageBuilder and want to use MVC, I think your best bet at this point is to go with a hybrid MVC/ASPX approach.