xdDesign Blogs

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.

I think that DNN 5 should offer more opportunity to add in gadgets and widgets to make it more socially attractive. I believe we will see that in the next 18 months so existing users of dnn do have something to look forward to. I think that the http://www.activesocial.com solution is quite unique in itself and I think is a drawcard for people wanting to look at social networking solution for their club or organisation.  I was under the impression that there would be a standalone solution for activesocial for people who didn’t want to use DNN so an extra opportunity for activemodules in the world of social networking web solutions.

I think DotNetNuke will have some good ecommerce opportunities.  There are enough varieties of ecommerce to plug directly into DNN to give customers a real website / store experience. This has, in my opinion been a strength of DNN that is a hidden gem.  Once setup and running, DNN is reliable, solid and keeps going day after day after day.  I can’t fault that aspect of it.

I read blogs and whinging about DNN and it’s compliancy and it sort of reminds me of a terrier at your heels you just want to give some more ‘firm encouragement’ to just go away.  And over time, the team has overcome many of the initial compliancy issues and now, we have an out of the box solution that works well, even though sometimes it can restrict the design.

By comparison to Joomla, I still think that designers who work with Joomla are still restricted and not all Joomla websites are compliant and the ones that are all tend to look the same. I guess that’s the decision we have to make in the end – how important is ‘compliancy’ and at what level. I think that people who want to come over from Joomla to DotNetNuke are doing so more for design reasons where they can’t satisfy a picky customer who wants something to look a specific way.

I really don’t like the user admin interface for Joomla though. Honestly, I find it confusing to say the least and I have learnt to love the ‘in situ’ method of handling content in a DNN site.  Having said that, it does take care and thought to design a website in DNN that maintains it’s look and feel when logged in and out. I have seen many a trashed site once logged in and feel that detracts from how people view the website.  But overall, website administration and management in DNN is more intuitive than people give it credit for. The depth in which you can manage something, right down to user level is quite impressive and, again, rock solid.

If you are a business that offers Sharepoint or high end Microsoft solutions, you would be cray NOT to pick up dnn and have a look at what it can offer your business.  I have said before and will say again, it’s an excellent option to have when coming up against those who are promoting open source as the be all end all.  It’s a handy tool to offer clients when budgets are not what they should be and it is also a good step to bring someone into your business and move them up toward other solutions in the future.

But the dynamics of DotNetNuke has changed significantly over the last couple of years and we don’t have the community participation at the level I would like to see and while participation on the forums is lack lustre, and the push for buying DNN is quite high, it’s still a worthy and incredibly robust solution to offer clients by simply downloading the free one from http://dotnetnuke.codeplex.com

I think DNN now has more competition to contend, particularly with it being an open source product as well as commercial.  When stacking some of these products side by side, eg.. the CMS Watch list had the following products listed below.

Simpler Products –
These are smaller, albeit established vendors that come to the
marketplace with packaged tools at attractive prices. However,
sometimes the tools are not as feature rich or as well tested as many
of their “mainstream” competitors.

DotNetNuke – DotNetNuke
– HQ: Seattle, WA, USA — Mentions: 3
Terminalfour – Site Manager
– HQ: Ireland — Mentions: 3
PaperThin – CommonSpot Content Server
– HQ: Quincy, MA, US — Mentions: 9
Telerik – Sitefinity CMS
– HQ: Sofia, BG — Mentions: 2
OmniUpdate – OU Campus
– HQ: Camarillo, California, US — Mentions: 4
Alterian – Content Manager Corporate Edition
– HQ: Bristol, United Kingdom — Mentions: 6
Joomla Project – Joomla!
– HQ: Global — Mentions: 17
OpenCms – OpenCms
– HQ: Global project — Mentions: 3

I believe a better comparison would have been to evaluate apples with apples.. – eg..
Open Source Solutions with Open Source Solutions and it was interesting to see that Telerik’s Sitefinity got a mention too. Have you ever tried it? It’s a 100mb download.. I was shocked when I was going to have a look at see what it could do. I simply could not get over the 100mb install and although the exe installs beautifully, I did not bother going any further.

I then went to http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix/cms-matrix and had a look at the updates comparing Joomla to DotNetNuke and was quite surprised and how far DNN has come along and what is built into the system.  Have you looked at it recently?  Well worth the visit.

Here is  a quick snippet of the DotNetNuke and Joomla comparison.  I was surprised that out of the box Joomla is NOT xhtml compliant. That’s a plus to get those terriers off the ankles.

So I think that while DNN has some competition in the marketplace, which like anything in this world you would expect, many of the shortcomings have been addressed and regardless of whether it took 12 months or 2 years longer, the point is – it is, after close on 7 years out, still an excellent, viable solution and worth considering if you want something that is easy to manage, is reliable and if you don’t fill it up with rubbish modules and things you’ll never use, it will run for years.  I’m still seeing sites that are many years old as responsive as ever.

For larger companies who are primarily Microsoft based, then it’s a perfect solution to work with and the open source nature of the product, along with excellent licensing makes it worth looking at.

Do yourself a favour and visit http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix/cms-matrix and do some of your own comparisons.  There are plenty of .NEt ones to compare with, and if you are completely new to this and looking for answers, here are my closing comments -

• DotNetNuke has been well supported by Microsoft over the years to provide a genuine windows based open source web solution.
• It is not a ‘cms’ solution as you think, but a Web Application Framework on which you build solutions.
• It has a unique standpoint that allows you to embed many solutions within the build without having to change the urls – like many of these pesky forums, stores and blogs, where you have to change applications and urls to work with.
• It has built in, off the shelf, incredibly impressive membership management. Taken directly from Microsoft Membership management infrastructure, it allows you to utilise third party authentication systems such as OpenID, Twitter, Facebook, without having to implement whole new systems.
• It upgrades well.
• Once setup and running, it just keeps running.
• Apples for Apples, it really is a first class product.

I hope this gives you some more food for thought when considering whether or not you should be using DNN for your next web solution. And by the way, I have only used the Community Edition version of DotNetNuke. I am working on a Professional Version of DNN and can verify that both Community and Professional are as good as each other. What it appears you pay for with the Professional edition is peace of mind I guess, but if you have a good developer / implementer already, you don’t need to go down the path and pay 2,000 per year to run your website.

Nina Meiers