Early last year I was evaluating DotNetNuke, Joomla and Community Server for quickstarts to getting commnunity features on infiLearn.com. Because we are fundamentaly a Microsoft shop Joomla fell off the plate fast and Community Server had just ramped up its pricing plus had the risk of not being an easy integration into a transactional site so it was passed on too.
But it took about a month of testing and coding before DotNetNuke was decided against. Like all of the others, integration was a barrier, but mostly, and this is no fault of DNN so much as the bottom line of IIS6, the company needed to spawn hundreds if not thousands of new discrete "portals" each day, each with its own community features. DotNetNuke, or rather IIS, required a set of physical virtual directories for each child portal and at the volume we needed it wasn't going to work.
But the time spent making modules and pulling apart skins and figuring out how to extend DNN got me thinking about the one thing that was starting to get tedious about the one-portal sitelett Smithvoice.com: Since 1996 every single page including the ebooks and example pops were all done in notepad; Starting with PearlCGI/HTML, then asp then ASP.Net. Nothing elitist against web "code", but it was a lot of 'been there done that'... sometimes we just wanted to get an idea or tip put on file and slogging through the treeview code was tiring.
So... first time ever and with some trepidation... we'll be trying out a more high level approach. Drag & drop components, premade authentication, just a place for our stuff.
A few days of gleaning the valid from the obsolete,converting the valid to the DNN containers, fixing links and making redirectors and here we are with a sitelett that's hopefully ready to make taking and displaying our notes quicker and easier.
While some of the core of DNN gives me the willies, fundamentally it is a solid architecture and, aside from the way child portals are tied to the file system, it's mostly how I would have made a portal product if I had the time and resources.
Bottom line, it works for me for now.
Tell me if it works for you.
smith