Well, I had huge lead up to Christmas this year, in fact it we’re not taking much time off at all with the amount of work that we have, and also I need claw back a bit of time from the problems that plagued me between July and December.

I have so many blogs and feeds I’m part of because it’s my research and way of getting the news to me where I can gleam over interesting topics and pick up some hints or two.

I subscribe to an RSS feed from a website called CMS watch. It covers all sorts of Content Management Systems and having gleamed over the ‘free’ information it’s amazing to see how many products there are on the market.  From their point of view there are 41 CMS products ranging from large scale solutions including Oracle & Open Text, Vignette, then to Upper Range solutions from products like Percussion and FatWire (never heard of them), Mid Range platforms, from Drupal through the Microsoft MOSS, Mid range Products from Ektron through to Magnolia and Simpler products where DotNetNuke and Joomla get mentioned.  Their ratings were based on their own criteria which seemed fair to average in interpretation to me, but I guess since I know DotnetNuke back to front in reference to implementation and management out of the box, and having been involved for so many years, and seeing that they had only mentioned DNN 3 times on their site, I didn’t feel it was totally unbiased.

I did feel that DotNetNuke was unrepresented there and I don’t know why. I sometimes find it very insular and single minded of groups and organisations who don’t give a fair and open view on things. They become what I feel are like Microsoft haters, although I am not suggesting this with the CMSWatch website. However, it is a culture that seems to be more visible on some sites than others.  And I try to be as objective as possible, even though I may criticise my DNN solution at times, I’m still using it.  Nothing wrong with having a whinge about a product. Nothing is perfect, each product has it’s own good points.

For some that know me for years, you’ll know that I’m an advocate of DNN and supported the project from the very moment I thought I had something to contribute.  It was around the world of skinning, where, just a few short years ago, it was fairly new.  I have and do work with Joomla, in fact we manage several sites for clients, and we have our own installs for testing and comparing.

We also install and test kentico, nopCommerce, WordPress, dasBlog, silverstripe and I discovered a commercial on yesterday called Pegboard CMS – I have a new client coming on board where they are not happy with the new current website and are concerned about being ‘locked in’ to company with a product they have to pay through the nose for to get updates.  over $2,500 to add ‘membership’ functionality I thought was excessive. And by that I mean – someone apart from a website administrator could log in and view content. So there are still some expensive CMS solutions around but I think their days are also numbered as companies move into offering different services.

It made me think back to how I will work with DotNetNuke throughout 2010. Has it gone past it’s use by date? Will it have a future? Should I be looking at other solutions? I think the era of making lots of money from skinning has gone.  Well, to be honest, I never made much on skinning because I focused mainly on higher end work and implementation. Although I have http://www.dnnskins.com – it’s for the community at large to ensure that the project has something to offer newcomers to DNN.

DotNetNuke is lacking a bit in fancy pants widgets to plug in and enjoy like wordpress has. I love some of these cool features that wordpress has, but I cannot write here honestly that I can compare DotNetNuke to WordPress – they are completely different applications and their purpose is different.