Well as I move forwad now with some updates to my business infrastructure, and successfully updating sites from earlier versions of DotNetNuke it’s interesting to see how the modules behave and honestly – I have got a site running from 3.0.13 >> 4.8 with the same module in there as 2005.  I was quite amazed.

Anyway- what I’ve done is upgrade my http://www.catalooksupport.com website to the latest version of DNN so I could test how the upgrade paths go – but this was a DNN 4+ install to begin with, but had stopped at 4.5 since I’d read a few issues with the upgrades on sites in the DNN 4.5 space.

For those who might not be aware, but back in 2006, I decided that there wasn’t enough information in English to support the Catalook ecommerce store product. I have seen that many products tend to get overlooked when they are not the best looking.  I understand this from a commercial perspective, but it’s a shame to see such a good product such as Catalook – ecommerce for DotNetNuke be overlooked yet it’s an excellent choice and when it comes to ‘bang for bucks’ – you can’t walk away from it.

What I do believe is that it’s not really an ‘off the shelf’ product and it has a learning curve on where to check this, or tweak that, or turn this off to get the desired results and for many end users this can prove to be too daunting or they are impatient and don’t understand the complexities of ecommerce.  I have really enoyed working with Catalook since around 2005 and to be honest, I’ve got sites running on it, without change, on dnn 3 sites that are rock solid. Once a DotNetNuke site is running and the Catalook store in installed and working, I have to say it’s very robust, incredibly robust to be honest, and for some people, they tend to get short sited and not look any longer than the ‘pain’ of getting it working.

What I was particularly impressed with was a client site that has grown from DNN 3.1.1 and been upgraded to 4.8 with the Catalook store in it (we upgraded due to some features we wanted that were not available in earlier versions of Catalook) and wow, flawless upgrade, flawless performance.    Did it have a couple of glitches – only until I hit the restart button under Host/Settings.

I’ve also implemented the PageBlaster module and it’s worked like a treat. I can’t fault these products – but I do say it’s important to make sure you don’t overload sites with modules you’ll never use, as well as removing modules you aren’t using and not testing ‘live sites’ with modules unless you’ve installed locally.

So this is another update to the work XD Design have been doing over the last short while and I’m keen to share some more links and information that might help you on your journey and travels working with this great application.