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 I haven't looked at it since version 4.3 so some of my criticism may be outdated.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
