How will DotNetNuke rate as a CMS in 2010

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