Please set me straight on DotNetNuke
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I just read a couple of posts that "nuked" DotNetNuke. I'd appreciate some substantive feedback about the drawbacks as I have been asked to use the 4.x framework to develop a site for a client. I just downloaded it this past weekend and have spent all of two hours with it so I'm hoping you all can save me some time if it's the wrong way to go. I'm more interested in architectural and business drawbacks than "real programmers do (or don't do) such and such..." My first impressions are that DNN can save me man- months of development time, but I'm concerned so far about the effort that would be required to customize it. If there are serious drawbacks, I'll need to be able to articulate them to the client and make a business case for the added development time. Thanks in advance.
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I just read a couple of posts that "nuked" DotNetNuke. I'd appreciate some substantive feedback about the drawbacks as I have been asked to use the 4.x framework to develop a site for a client. I just downloaded it this past weekend and have spent all of two hours with it so I'm hoping you all can save me some time if it's the wrong way to go. I'm more interested in architectural and business drawbacks than "real programmers do (or don't do) such and such..." My first impressions are that DNN can save me man- months of development time, but I'm concerned so far about the effort that would be required to customize it. If there are serious drawbacks, I'll need to be able to articulate them to the client and make a business case for the added development time. Thanks in advance.
To be honest, I just found the documentation and whole setup process just so godawful. Plus, the whole damn thing was so inflexible. You'd probably be better off looking at something like Community Server.
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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I just read a couple of posts that "nuked" DotNetNuke. I'd appreciate some substantive feedback about the drawbacks as I have been asked to use the 4.x framework to develop a site for a client. I just downloaded it this past weekend and have spent all of two hours with it so I'm hoping you all can save me some time if it's the wrong way to go. I'm more interested in architectural and business drawbacks than "real programmers do (or don't do) such and such..." My first impressions are that DNN can save me man- months of development time, but I'm concerned so far about the effort that would be required to customize it. If there are serious drawbacks, I'll need to be able to articulate them to the client and make a business case for the added development time. Thanks in advance.
- Documentation is YEARS behind the current version. 2) If you want *real* help, you have to buy one or more books. 3) It's a slug once you get it running with any substantive content. 4) The forums on the DNN home page won't do you any good because they're heavily moderated. Your question won't show up for DAYS. 5) It started out as a Microsoft project (that fact alone should be enough to make you look for something else).
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
- Documentation is YEARS behind the current version. 2) If you want *real* help, you have to buy one or more books. 3) It's a slug once you get it running with any substantive content. 4) The forums on the DNN home page won't do you any good because they're heavily moderated. Your question won't show up for DAYS. 5) It started out as a Microsoft project (that fact alone should be enough to make you look for something else).
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
- It started out as a Microsoft project
Not strictly true. It started off as a port of a Microsoft project that was targetting a completely different application.
John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
- It's a slug once you get it running with any substantive content.
Again not quite true. This statement implies a speed that it simply doesn't have. Perhaps a better analogy would be that it's a tree sloth that didn't feel well, and then died, before being buried in tar for three years.
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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I just read a couple of posts that "nuked" DotNetNuke. I'd appreciate some substantive feedback about the drawbacks as I have been asked to use the 4.x framework to develop a site for a client. I just downloaded it this past weekend and have spent all of two hours with it so I'm hoping you all can save me some time if it's the wrong way to go. I'm more interested in architectural and business drawbacks than "real programmers do (or don't do) such and such..." My first impressions are that DNN can save me man- months of development time, but I'm concerned so far about the effort that would be required to customize it. If there are serious drawbacks, I'll need to be able to articulate them to the client and make a business case for the added development time. Thanks in advance.
I have used DNN for a few years now. It is a very fast way to get a site up and going. While in the past, it was a bit rough at times getting setup, nowadays it is pretty simple. You can even host multiple sites with one install of DNN on a single IP. That said, it depends on what type of site you want to have and if the client wants to provide content or make modifications without having to hire someone to do it all the time. You can edit any of the content from within a web browser so it is easy to rearrange or make modifications by the client. It comes with user management built in with email verifcations and now even OpenID. You can run a private membership site, a public membership site or both. It is very simple and comes at zero effort per site to setup memberships. Membership is can also be role based can be customized. Much of DNN uses a provider model so if you do not like the way a part is handled, you can simply swap out a new provider and you are off and going. DNN is basically structured where pages are built by added a number of different modules on a page. They have a number of modules that come with the system which includes things such as Forums, Blogs, Gallery, Resources, etc. All of these you simple drop on a page, set any configuration it may need (all in the web browser) and you are done. WIth DNN it is possible to setup a site that has a blog, forums and file resource center where part or all is membership based, within less than an hour. It is fairly easy to build your own modules to add to sites. There are a number of free resources available. There is also Visual Studio templates that make it a no-brainer. The largest problem I see about DNN is the performance is not as good as a stand along ASP.NET web application that a developer would build. Of course, if the site is not going to be heavily loaded (such as running hundreds of sites on a single server or large amounts of traffic), DNN works quite well. I would not use DNN for every site and at times it can be just as easy to build a normal web application if you do not plan to have many features. With all that DNN gives you along with the ease of clients being able to add / modify and remove content, it is a great solution. So, do you want to shave a fraction of a second off a page load and spend weeks to months builing your own and spend a little time getting use to DNN and then be able to knock out sites in hours. I will warn you though, there is a little overhead at the beginning getting use to t
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I just read a couple of posts that "nuked" DotNetNuke. I'd appreciate some substantive feedback about the drawbacks as I have been asked to use the 4.x framework to develop a site for a client. I just downloaded it this past weekend and have spent all of two hours with it so I'm hoping you all can save me some time if it's the wrong way to go. I'm more interested in architectural and business drawbacks than "real programmers do (or don't do) such and such..." My first impressions are that DNN can save me man- months of development time, but I'm concerned so far about the effort that would be required to customize it. If there are serious drawbacks, I'll need to be able to articulate them to the client and make a business case for the added development time. Thanks in advance.
jond777 wrote:
If there are serious drawbacks,
Visual Basic. 'nough said. ;P
only two letters away from being an asset
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I just read a couple of posts that "nuked" DotNetNuke. I'd appreciate some substantive feedback about the drawbacks as I have been asked to use the 4.x framework to develop a site for a client. I just downloaded it this past weekend and have spent all of two hours with it so I'm hoping you all can save me some time if it's the wrong way to go. I'm more interested in architectural and business drawbacks than "real programmers do (or don't do) such and such..." My first impressions are that DNN can save me man- months of development time, but I'm concerned so far about the effort that would be required to customize it. If there are serious drawbacks, I'll need to be able to articulate them to the client and make a business case for the added development time. Thanks in advance.
jond777 wrote:
My first impressions are that DNN can save me man- months of development time
Yeah, but it's the girl months that'll really cost you. They're a much tougher breed than the guys are. :-D
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Coming soon: Got a career question? Ask the Attack Chihuahua! www.PracticalUSA.com
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I just read a couple of posts that "nuked" DotNetNuke. I'd appreciate some substantive feedback about the drawbacks as I have been asked to use the 4.x framework to develop a site for a client. I just downloaded it this past weekend and have spent all of two hours with it so I'm hoping you all can save me some time if it's the wrong way to go. I'm more interested in architectural and business drawbacks than "real programmers do (or don't do) such and such..." My first impressions are that DNN can save me man- months of development time, but I'm concerned so far about the effort that would be required to customize it. If there are serious drawbacks, I'll need to be able to articulate them to the client and make a business case for the added development time. Thanks in advance.
As with anything, the perception of DNN will vary greatly depending on many factors. I have invested allot of hours into setting up and managing a few DNN based portals (mostly 3.X versions). * My #1 complaint is/was that page load/display performance was very bad, even on powerful hardware. * We also came across a couple major security holes that caused me at least one long night. * Setup/config can be painful, but I've heard that its been improved in V4+. * The documentation is woefully lacking in almost every regard. * Not sure if this is true with version 4, but version 3 did not really support web parts which is the ASP.NET/Sharepoint way of adding components. * Modules were easy enough to develop as long as there were no interdependencies. If you tried to build modules that were inter-dependent in some way, it was much harder and required hacks. * Lacks personalization capabilities (again, not sure about V4). * Code was in VB.NET (yuck!) On the plus sides, once it was setup adding content is fairly easy as long as content was supported by the provided modules. Also, deploying to sharted hosting environments is very doable. Oh yea, there are allot of 3rd party modules available for DNN available for free and at nominal cost. Remember the saying: "you get what you pay for". My experience with the "inexpensive" 3rd party modules was that they were buggy, slow and poorly written. Depending on your needs, Sharepoint Services may be a good fit. Performance is pretty good, module development is straight-forward, documentation is OK, setup is painless. The biggest drawback to Sharepoint Services IMO is deployment onto shared-hosting environments.
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I just read a couple of posts that "nuked" DotNetNuke. I'd appreciate some substantive feedback about the drawbacks as I have been asked to use the 4.x framework to develop a site for a client. I just downloaded it this past weekend and have spent all of two hours with it so I'm hoping you all can save me some time if it's the wrong way to go. I'm more interested in architectural and business drawbacks than "real programmers do (or don't do) such and such..." My first impressions are that DNN can save me man- months of development time, but I'm concerned so far about the effort that would be required to customize it. If there are serious drawbacks, I'll need to be able to articulate them to the client and make a business case for the added development time. Thanks in advance.
DNN can save you a lot of effort and time, depending on how you want to go about dealing with it. It can also be very frustrating if you don't bother taking the time to check it out first. Here are my rules of thumb: 1) DO NOT have your DNN site hosted on a generic shared ASP.NET hosting service. It will be slow. Really slow. GoDaddy and WebHost4Life fall into this category (as do their derivatives). 2) DO have it hosted at a place like PowerDNN. Your site will be fast. I moved a site from WebHost4Life to PowerDNN and the initial load time went from 20-30 seconds to 2-4 seconds. Seriously. 3) DO NOT reinvent the wheel. I can set up a DNN site to work the way I want, with plenty of functionality for around $750 CAD. That includes about 8 modules I typically use and a higher-end skin. Once that's done, I'll need to spend some time customizing the module CSS and some of the source code, but that time is minimal compared to writing everything from scratch. 4) DO get a good book on setting up and maintaining DNN sites. 5) DO spend a bunch of time scanning through the top sellers on SnowCovered. The DNN marketplace is essentially a subset of SnowCovered, so I don't bother looking there. Hope that helps, Drew.
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
- It started out as a Microsoft project
Not strictly true. It started off as a port of a Microsoft project that was targetting a completely different application.
John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
- It's a slug once you get it running with any substantive content.
Again not quite true. This statement implies a speed that it simply doesn't have. Perhaps a better analogy would be that it's a tree sloth that didn't feel well, and then died, before being buried in tar for three years.
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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As with anything, the perception of DNN will vary greatly depending on many factors. I have invested allot of hours into setting up and managing a few DNN based portals (mostly 3.X versions). * My #1 complaint is/was that page load/display performance was very bad, even on powerful hardware. * We also came across a couple major security holes that caused me at least one long night. * Setup/config can be painful, but I've heard that its been improved in V4+. * The documentation is woefully lacking in almost every regard. * Not sure if this is true with version 4, but version 3 did not really support web parts which is the ASP.NET/Sharepoint way of adding components. * Modules were easy enough to develop as long as there were no interdependencies. If you tried to build modules that were inter-dependent in some way, it was much harder and required hacks. * Lacks personalization capabilities (again, not sure about V4). * Code was in VB.NET (yuck!) On the plus sides, once it was setup adding content is fairly easy as long as content was supported by the provided modules. Also, deploying to sharted hosting environments is very doable. Oh yea, there are allot of 3rd party modules available for DNN available for free and at nominal cost. Remember the saying: "you get what you pay for". My experience with the "inexpensive" 3rd party modules was that they were buggy, slow and poorly written. Depending on your needs, Sharepoint Services may be a good fit. Performance is pretty good, module development is straight-forward, documentation is OK, setup is painless. The biggest drawback to Sharepoint Services IMO is deployment onto shared-hosting environments.
Matt Gullett wrote:
sharted hosting
As in, the Web server sharted when it tried to run DNN? :-D (To be fair, it has been years since I used it. It may well be a nice app now.)
Jon Sagara On a traffic light yellow means yield, and green means go. On a banana, it's just the opposite, yellow means go ahead, green means stop, and red means, where'd you get that banana? -- Mitch Hedberg .NET Blog | Personal Blog | Articles
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote:
This statement implies a speed that it simply doesn't have
That's not quite true either. If it's hosted properly it can be quite fast. I'm a convert now that I've moved one of my DNN sites to PowerDNN. Cheers, Drew.
Drew Stainton wrote:
PowerDNN
Giant Tree Sloth on steroids... great, what is the world coming to? ;)
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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Drew Stainton wrote:
PowerDNN
Giant Tree Sloth on steroids... great, what is the world coming to? ;)
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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To be honest, I just found the documentation and whole setup process just so godawful. Plus, the whole damn thing was so inflexible. You'd probably be better off looking at something like Community Server.
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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jond777 wrote:
If there are serious drawbacks,
Visual Basic. 'nough said. ;P
only two letters away from being an asset
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As with anything, the perception of DNN will vary greatly depending on many factors. I have invested allot of hours into setting up and managing a few DNN based portals (mostly 3.X versions). * My #1 complaint is/was that page load/display performance was very bad, even on powerful hardware. * We also came across a couple major security holes that caused me at least one long night. * Setup/config can be painful, but I've heard that its been improved in V4+. * The documentation is woefully lacking in almost every regard. * Not sure if this is true with version 4, but version 3 did not really support web parts which is the ASP.NET/Sharepoint way of adding components. * Modules were easy enough to develop as long as there were no interdependencies. If you tried to build modules that were inter-dependent in some way, it was much harder and required hacks. * Lacks personalization capabilities (again, not sure about V4). * Code was in VB.NET (yuck!) On the plus sides, once it was setup adding content is fairly easy as long as content was supported by the provided modules. Also, deploying to sharted hosting environments is very doable. Oh yea, there are allot of 3rd party modules available for DNN available for free and at nominal cost. Remember the saying: "you get what you pay for". My experience with the "inexpensive" 3rd party modules was that they were buggy, slow and poorly written. Depending on your needs, Sharepoint Services may be a good fit. Performance is pretty good, module development is straight-forward, documentation is OK, setup is painless. The biggest drawback to Sharepoint Services IMO is deployment onto shared-hosting environments.
Matt Gullett wrote:
* Code was in VB.NET (yuck!)
Can you elaborate more why?
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I just read a couple of posts that "nuked" DotNetNuke. I'd appreciate some substantive feedback about the drawbacks as I have been asked to use the 4.x framework to develop a site for a client. I just downloaded it this past weekend and have spent all of two hours with it so I'm hoping you all can save me some time if it's the wrong way to go. I'm more interested in architectural and business drawbacks than "real programmers do (or don't do) such and such..." My first impressions are that DNN can save me man- months of development time, but I'm concerned so far about the effort that would be required to customize it. If there are serious drawbacks, I'll need to be able to articulate them to the client and make a business case for the added development time. Thanks in advance.
First of all, you will need to spend at least a few days to really digest what DotNetNuke is all about. As with any framework, there is a steep learning curve until it really sinks in and you realize how it works and/or how it can work for you. It is a solid foundation for any Content Management System (CMS) requiring multiple portals, security, manageability, scalability, and extensibility. DotNetNuke is designed specifically for Microsoft’s .net framework, written in Visual Basic.net and targeting ASP.net. The code can be used with the free Visual Web Developer to high end Visual Studio 2005 & 2008. The latest version (DNN 4.8.2) supports ASP.NET 2.0 & 3.5 with Internet Information Services (IIS) v5 (Windows Server 2000), v6 (Windows XP/Server 2003) & v7 (Windows Vista/Server 2008), supporting SQL Server 2005 Express to Enterprise. (Note: SQL 2008 is not available at this time). The source code is based on enterprise level architecture using software patterns and best practices. While the core may demonstrate use of Microsoft’s Enterprise Library such as the Data Access, Security, or Configuration Application Blocks, it does not prevent developers from incorporating their own technologies and techniques into the framework. Modules can be developed in any .NET compatible language. Managed code is all that counts. What you might find interesting is that DotNetNuke seems to be a test bed for technology. Various DNN features have found their way back into ASP.net, Visual Studio, Application Blocks and SharePoint. This brings us to SharePoint, which is undoubtedly comparable with DotNetNuke. IMHO the major differences between the two are availability of custom modules and price. Comparison matrix to SharePoint (Last Year) http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryID/506/Default.aspx Business wise, they both use Microsoft technologies exclusively, using different terminology such as modules vs. web parts and master pages vs. skins. Once they are setup though, SharePoint seems to require more IT related support than DotNetNuke. Even Microsoft did not expect the explosive growth of SharePoint http://www.itworldcanada.com/pages/Docbase/ViewArticle.aspx?ID=idgml-45a09da1-3e5f-4f79&sub=556149 The biggest problems I have seen with DotNetNuke are configuration of
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Matt Gullett wrote:
* Code was in VB.NET (yuck!)
Can you elaborate more why?
I don't get into the language religous wars, so I'll give you my take on VB.NET. By itself, VB.NET is a fine language that allows a programmer to leverage the .NET platform. As such, it's comparable to C# in many ways (more than most will admit). There's nothing you can build in C# that you can't build in VB.NET. The syntax is different and a few use-cases are different, but by-and-large they are 1:1 equals in terms of capabilities. Much of my feelings for VB.NET have to do with it's legacy and impact on the development community. Over the years I've worked with a variety of different languages, software platforms, and programmers. Much of the work I've done in my career is "systems development", not "gui development". VB (prior to VB.NET) was a decent forms-based development language. However, the types of systems I built were not forms-based applications. VB had very little support for non-forms based applications and when you tried to build something other than a forms-based app, the whole app became a hack within a hack (think MDI applications). Worse, VB provide no access to lower-level constructs (e.g. linked lists, hash tables, etc) that were commonly needed. This usually meant that you had to write something in C++ and compile it as an ActiveX or COM object. Also, in VB, you were completely dependent on ActiveX/COM components (often 3rd party) to do various functions like TCP communications, "fancy" GUI widgets. In my experience, this led to a hodge-podge of components from various vendors integrated into VB applications. Some would say this is a good thing, but my experience with it, was that it was always a PITA because one piece used the FlexGrid, another used the SymnaGrid, and they weren't compatible, etc. By the time a full-fledged application was built in VB (the kind of applications I built, anyway), 50% or more was done in C++. IMO it would have been easier to just do the whole think in C++/MFC. Pile onto this, the fact that in earlier years, code performance was more important than it is today and VB just couldn't stand up to more powerful development environments like C++, MFC(*), Delphi, etc. (*MFC is technically an extension of C++, but I think most developers think of programming MFC with C++, but not necessarily C++ with MFC.) MS really pushed and marketed VB. IMO, much more than they pushed C++/MFC. This lead to a real disconnect in the development community between the C++ and VB communities. It also lead to a belief among non-programmers that VB was a l
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I have used DNN for a few years now. It is a very fast way to get a site up and going. While in the past, it was a bit rough at times getting setup, nowadays it is pretty simple. You can even host multiple sites with one install of DNN on a single IP. That said, it depends on what type of site you want to have and if the client wants to provide content or make modifications without having to hire someone to do it all the time. You can edit any of the content from within a web browser so it is easy to rearrange or make modifications by the client. It comes with user management built in with email verifcations and now even OpenID. You can run a private membership site, a public membership site or both. It is very simple and comes at zero effort per site to setup memberships. Membership is can also be role based can be customized. Much of DNN uses a provider model so if you do not like the way a part is handled, you can simply swap out a new provider and you are off and going. DNN is basically structured where pages are built by added a number of different modules on a page. They have a number of modules that come with the system which includes things such as Forums, Blogs, Gallery, Resources, etc. All of these you simple drop on a page, set any configuration it may need (all in the web browser) and you are done. WIth DNN it is possible to setup a site that has a blog, forums and file resource center where part or all is membership based, within less than an hour. It is fairly easy to build your own modules to add to sites. There are a number of free resources available. There is also Visual Studio templates that make it a no-brainer. The largest problem I see about DNN is the performance is not as good as a stand along ASP.NET web application that a developer would build. Of course, if the site is not going to be heavily loaded (such as running hundreds of sites on a single server or large amounts of traffic), DNN works quite well. I would not use DNN for every site and at times it can be just as easy to build a normal web application if you do not plan to have many features. With all that DNN gives you along with the ease of clients being able to add / modify and remove content, it is a great solution. So, do you want to shave a fraction of a second off a page load and spend weeks to months builing your own and spend a little time getting use to DNN and then be able to knock out sites in hours. I will warn you though, there is a little overhead at the beginning getting use to t
We've been using it for a while now, from version 2 to the latest 4.8 version that we're testing. It's definitely bloated, it's slow at times, and a bit of a learning curve to configure correctly. That being said, it's fairly easy to get a content driven site out there to support a lot of internal users. The one thing we found is that cutting off access or responsibility to departments ended up in IT doing a lot of work. Delegate responsibility to department heads for getting their own content updated and out there and you'll have a lot better time of it. There is a lot to what Rocky and some of the others said. Finding help is a lot of hunting, and truthfully, their forums are kind of stinky. All in all, it's a lot of document and content management with a LOT of iFrames that I built custom apps in VS and generated apps from Iron Speed Designer - which I recommend. Good Luck! :laugh:
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I just read a couple of posts that "nuked" DotNetNuke. I'd appreciate some substantive feedback about the drawbacks as I have been asked to use the 4.x framework to develop a site for a client. I just downloaded it this past weekend and have spent all of two hours with it so I'm hoping you all can save me some time if it's the wrong way to go. I'm more interested in architectural and business drawbacks than "real programmers do (or don't do) such and such..." My first impressions are that DNN can save me man- months of development time, but I'm concerned so far about the effort that would be required to customize it. If there are serious drawbacks, I'll need to be able to articulate them to the client and make a business case for the added development time. Thanks in advance.
I worked on four major DNN projects using version 3 and early versions of 4. That was enough for me, I doubt that I will ever use it again. I haven't looked at it since version 4.3 so some of my criticism may be outdated. It really depends on the business goals. DNN is a portal framework. It is not a CMS. It is not an application framework. If you need to build a portal, then DNN may be a good fit. I tried to use DNN as both a CMS and a general web application framework and the results were not good. As a CMS, DNN lacks several key features such as versioning, auditing, approval chains, etc. There is a "Managed Content" module that you can purchase which provides these features at the module level, but nothing is built in to provide these features on a page or system-wide level. As a web application framework, I found DNN to be too inflexible. It was just too high of an abstraction to do some of the things that we wanted to do. Writing custom modules is not difficult, but if you need to do something that doesn't fit into the DNN paradigm of pages and modules then you quickly fall into rough waters. I have had much more success using MonoRail/ActiveRecord from the Castle project as a web application framework. Another major pain point with DNN was producing valid xhtml and html output. It was possible, but required making changes to the core and almost any module that you wished to use. Once you go down this path, you are basically creating your own fork of the DNN project and maintenance becomes a burden. DNN is also very complex. I would think twice about applying it to smaller web projects that do not need such a large, complicated solution. Overall, I wouldn't dismiss the DNN project, but I would look carefully to see if really meets your business goals. If your business goals line up with DNN, then I think it can be a real time saver. Regards, Eric