How will DotNetNuke rate as a CMS in 2010

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.