Background
It all started with a tweet, the intention wasn’t to cause trouble, but to simply highlight what I thought of the contents of the post in question. I got a reply surprisingly quick from the co-founder who suggested “It is easy to take a shot at someone in abstract…”, and then “how bout a real discussion on the merits or lack thereof of his points”. Ok, let me elaborate.
Disclaimer
I’ll get this out of the way now, this is my blog so I’m entitled to my opinion, but so are you. If you don’t agree with my opinion, that’s fine with me, I don’t care at all. However, if you’ve never tried to use/customise/configure/upgrade/install this steaming p.o.s. then hold back any disagreement with me until after you have. Note: I’m not forcing you to try it out, that would be mean..
Retort — ask and ye shall receive
Those who work on DotNetNuke seem to be constantly defending themselves over the openness of their open-source project, so much so that I’m sure there are more defensive efforts than actual attacks. Despite what I think of their “openness”, I’m not here to specifically attack how open it is. Well not to begin with anyway, we’ll see what happens once I get going.
Much like Tony said some of their statements are broad, sweeping generalisations of little substance, I think the article was intended to defend their stance as open-source, but if anything it kind of makes them appear as though they are just looking for excuses. There are a few brilliant pieces in the article that are more than worth further comment, take for instance these 6 different ‘open source’ interpretation examples that were given…
To a Developer. “Open Source” means the “collaborative and open / transparent development of software“
To a Technical / Product Executive. “Open Source” means a “better software development model“
To a Business Executive. “Open Source” means a “new and better software business model; software distribution model; or software sales model or some combination“
To the linguistically inclined. “Open Source” means “software that is open; i.e. software whose source code is open“
To the Customer (Technical). “Open Source” means “software that is open, reliance and that can be easily enhanced or maintained“
To the Customer (Business). “Open Source” means “reliable software that provides greater value/dollar that everybody seems to be talking about“
So thats what they got from different groups of people. Interesting, I would thought that to defend something you’d provide examples that support the type of things that you do, or at least word them so they sound like they were supporting you. Maybe they actually believe they are doing some of those things.
Overall those examples are probably fair enough, but in relation to DNN all they do is highlight what they don’t follow.
- collaborative and open / transparent development of software — opaque, translucent maybe, but transparent?
- better software development model — a model where massive bugs can remain unfixed for over a year is simply brilliant, why didn’t I think of that.
- reliable software that provides greater value/dollar that everybody seems to be talking about — yeah, ok, so DNN is free (not taking into account how much the MS platform it runs on will cost you to set up, and then there is paid-for modules, skins etc), but “reliable”, yeah, not so much, kind of falls off the face of the planet on that one. Even the DNN project site itself is quite often down (or hideously, unusably slow), which is awesome when trying to use the broken forums to find support on something that no one except the developer knows anything about, and even they don’t apparently care too much since they haven’t updated their broken module for a year. To me the ‘value’ of free software is very little if it doesn’t work, as it quickly becomes “un-free” once a developer has to be paid to fix it.
- software that is open, reliance and that can be easily enhanced or maintained — yeah… see above.
From that they drew this genius conclusion:
Who is right? Everybody is right in their own way. Then again, Nobody is right — when viewed from the others perspective. … So, what does open source mean to DNN Corp? From our perspective, we don’t want to get caught up in the linguistics of open source. For us, open source is a means to an end.
I think when they said “other perspective” they meant “our perspective”. They “don’t want to get caught up in the linguistics of open source” which from their definitions above indicates that they don’t care much for “software that is open; i.e. software whose source code is open”. Well, thats just peachy. As for their “means to an end” comment, well, more on that later.
To and fro
The follow up to the “sweeping generalisations” tweet mentioned above was this reply:
That blog is not written by a coder, but rather by the DNN Corp CEO. You are likely not the intended audience for the msg.
So who exactly was it aimed at? Was it intended for the decision makers, higher executives, those who don’t necessary know better, those who hear “open source” and think “that means free, lets do it”, those who like big words or those with a weakness for believing every fluffy justification dropped in front of them…
Ok, I can (kind of) see why you’d do that, but do you really think they are the ones who are going to be reading the post? I only read it because I was trawling through the numerous blogs in the hope of finding something useful like the announcement of a new module release or 17 that might fix one of the many issues I’ve found, and I imagine I’m not the only one who’s done this. Not to mention that it would most likely be the “coders” who were the ones raising the questions around the open-source-ness of DNN in the first place, which should then mean that they *are* actually the intended audience.
Meaning of means to an end
Ok, back to that “means to an end” comment from before, the ‘end’ for DNN is:
first, to ensure that DotNetNuke becomes the defacto standard for building web applications (web sites, intranets, extranets etc.) in the world — first on the Microsoft stack, and then elsewhere;
ROFLMAO. Seriously guys, how getting the thing to a point where people should actually consider using it on a grand (or even tiny) scale before working on world domination. If DNN ever becomes the the de-facto standard I’m leaving the industry and joining the dying trade of hard-cover book-binding. A book knows its a book at least 99.9% of the time, DNN isn’t sure exactly what it is — its a web-thingo with many very split, psychotic personalities, none of which are dominant.
second, to ensure that we enrich all the participants in our ecosystem — we have done this so far from a product / technology perspective — we intend to take that to the business side of the house as well
Ok, who are these ‘participants’ in your ‘ecosystem’? and what have you done from a product/technology perspective? Out of interest, what are your ‘participants’ thoughts on poverty, starvation and depression? Is there a module I can download for those too?
Value, right…
The article then states that the bottom line for “open source” is how much value the project has added to the economy or market eco-system. Apparently because they’ve got 5.7 million downloads, 450,000 live instances and hundred of thousands of users and developers they are far superior to the “pure” open source projects. For those that haven’t read the post, “pure” is basically just a term they grouped normal open source projects under. They pose this question (which is no doubt rhetorical)
How many so called “pure” open source projects have added comparable economic value? We rest our case!
Come on, do I need to begin no this one? Who are you comparing yourself to? What are you basing your claims on? Who are you trying to fool? Oh, right, those who don’t know better. I rest my case.
…Actually, no I’m not resting it just yet, I’m not quite done.
The tag line
From the DNN homepage:
DotNetNuke is the ideal platform for building professional websites with dynamic content and interactive features.
If by ‘ideal’ they mean ‘wrong’, and by ‘professional’ they mean ‘amateur’, and by ‘dynamic content’ they mean the use of ajax features which cause the entire page to reload or break, and by ‘interactive features’ they mean, ah, umm, not sure what they mean… then yes that’s a great tag line.
Module madness
Remember that module I mentioned above that hasn’t been updated for over a year? Well its the core Forum module, and it was last updated October 16th 2007. What’s more the bug (one of several) results in this (note: that is a screenshot of the DNN support forum on DotNetNuke.com — good to see them eating their own dog food). I can’t whine about the forums and not mention the table structure, oh how I love tables. Check this piece of genius work out. Useless nested tables make cute kittens die.
The saddest part of all that, is that despite its flaws the forum module is actually one of the more reliable and stable core modules, most of its functions mostly work (most of the time), sure it’s ugly as sin, poorly laid out etc, but what part of DNN isn’t?
The forums other main issue is that they put things in places where they don’t belong, for example, just about every forum I’ve ever used puts the reply/quote/etc links at the bottom of each reply, DNN, it puts them at the top. Now this wouldn’t be a huge problem if the templates could be changed without having to recompile the modules code, but they can’t. Well the admin screens can, but all the public facing stuff can’t. Super.
Dicking around with Documentation
You thought a one year old module was bad, how about documentation that hasn’t been updated for almost three years, and is yet renamed with each release to give the illusion that it has been. Don’t believe me? Go download it for yourself at the DNN site and see what I’m talking about. You can open any one of the 27 pdfs they provide and you’ll find ‘last modified’ dates of anywhere between April 2006 and August 2006. Several with useful comment like “applies to DotNetNuke 3.3÷4.1″… this is in the DotNetNuke_05.00.00_Docs.zip package. Oh c’mon guys, give us a break.
(un)Support forums
Do a quick search (if the search functionality is working) around the DNN support forums and you’ll notice a few things. Threads that ask for support rarely result in any useful help being given, and quite often end in “no it doesn’t do that” or “we’d like it to do that in the future”. And that goes well with my next point.
I’d actually hoped to point to you specific examples to prove my point but at the time or writing, you guessed it, dotnetnuke.com is down for maintenance, and apparently ha been for a couple of hours.
Being a web standard would require you to follow web standards.
Even getting close would be nice, take a look at what the output from the W3C Validator looked like when I passed DNN though it while back. 1054 Errors kind of says it all, I think this was running 4.8 or 4.9 at the time, and interestingly it reported less errors when checked as html4, and even less again when checked as html3.
Incessant use of tables for EVERYTHING, is a down right pain in the arse, and even in the forum module where I was willing to accept tables as being appropriate they go and do stupid shit like this.
It is now the year 2009, I think you can start to let people use more than 216 colours. Restricting colours to hex values that contain the characters 0,3,6,9,C,F is so 1994 its not funny. Even worse is that this is still an improvement from the stupid select box colour picker they’d used in the past (think a normal select box, but instead of text values its just colours, no indication what the hex code of the colour you’re selecting is.)
Stop trying to be everything to everyone
For the love of all that is good and holy, please stop. So DNN thinks it can do blogs, forums, news, chats, polls, events, wikis etc all at the same time making it better than everyone else, but truth is that it doesn’t do any of them anywhere near the level it needs to in order to be effective, let alone to get anywhere near its goal of becoming the “defacto standard for web applications”. Using a product simply because it give the appearance it can do everything you need it to is a stupid idea. There I said it.
For example, if you want a blog, install WordPress, Moveable Type, Habari, TypePad or one of the other dozen decent blog packages out there that actually has all the features you need, has decent documentation, has a good community around it, and most importantly works as advertised. Importantly if the blog is central to what you are going to be doing, don’t choose DNN.
The same goes for forums, news and everything else, find something that does the job correctly, don’t just choose one product because it kills all you’re birds with one stone. It’s only capable of that because it’s a huge fucking stone (and about that useful).
DNN is probably has the potential of becoming a system worth using, but until they focus their attention on fixing the countless bugs, and providing the features that people expect, and get, from much ‘younger’ projects, instead of writing books about DNN and silly blog posts defending things they shouldn’t have reason to be defending, then its a long way from being worthy.
Conclusion
Ok, so I’ve cruised well past 2,000 words, should wrap things up I guess. I could go on, but I won’t. Like I said at the beginning, this is just my opinion, yours might vary, and that’s ok. If you’ve never had the pleasure of using DNN, do yourself a favour and request that your local ISP blocks the url so that you never can. If you’ve used it, you probably won’t want to block them just yet because you’ll no doubt find yourself needing to wade through the crap in the support forums looking for useful answers. Good luck.
It’s definitely not just a case of “Not black enough, not white enough, not open source enough”, DotNetNuke is simply not good enough.
I rest my case. …and get suited up in flame proof attire
i know this is an old article but It’s new to me. The company I work for has been using dnn for 3 years. If it worked it would be great, but it just doesn’t. It’s an application, so it’s constantly crashing, even on the best dnn-optimized servers on Earth. It’s databases randomly revert text and image content to months ago. It’s dreadfully behind in html and css web and mobile standards — skin your pretty design and watch it ulgify itself over time. Buying modules or getting support is as pleasant stabbing your self in the face. Sometimes just adding a JavaScript creates an error. Worst part is there are security threats and emails going out biannually, so critical upgrades kill your modules. Your bookbinding analogy is right on: meanwhile in the world there’s a panacea of free and cheap website solutions (even outside of wordpress) that make dnn’s user experience feel like it’s made of rusted cranks and gears.
great post davie locksmith
I’ve been in the DNN world since it started. I was a member of the Core Team for several years. Actually, I’m the primary architect of the Skinning engine. I got less and less involved as the rest of the team got more and more interested in how they could make money off of it.
I clearly remember an e-mail discussion about documentation. The general feeling was that they should not do much documentation, because one of the team members was writing a support book, and we certainly didn’t want to hurt her sales. As a result, the pdf on skinning is still 95% what I wrote over seven years ago, but the skinning engine has evolved a lot since then.
Let me say this– DNN skinning really is easy, if you have good documentation to go with it. But you don’t, so it isn’t.
I’ve been looking for ways to move my sites off of DNN, and I get closer every day. I just downloaded version 5.6.0 and ran the upgrade. Well… It isn’t the first time it’s crashed. It’s a good thing I always have a fresh database backup and a full copy of the sites’ files before I do an upgrade.
Since I left the Core Team, I have watched as DNN has become more and more complex; more and more bloated. They should have stuck to the core and concentrated on making it rock solid. But instead, they have tried to be everything to everybody. Once upon a time, they had a great platform with a few basic modules, and you could literally do anything you wanted by installing a module to do it. But now, they have spread themselves so thin trying to have a full set of big mature core modules, that the core has suffered, bugs don’g get fixed, and projects don’t get finished.
DNN used to be “more than good enough.” For that matter, once upon a time it was the best you could get. But that was then. You might argue that it’s better than ever, if you’re into the Microsoft pattern of one application that does everything. But that would be a misinformed opinion. DNN should do one thing well– provide a secure platform that you can build or buy great modules for. Instead, it does a lot of things not so well.
Here is a useful link:
http://www.r2integrated.com/dnn/Services/CMSComparison.aspx
feature based comparisons are nice for marketing, but they dont really show the implementation of those features, a product could have a gazillion features, but it doesnt matter if they are implemented poorly.
nor does comparing the 2009 feature sets of most of the CMSs to the 2007 feature set of WordPress, or the 2005 feature set of Sharepoint… not really a fair comparison?
BTW, I’ve heard Windows 7 is way more awesome than MacOS 8…
Sorry… in my last article it was supposed to be $225 total cost NOT $25… I paid for News Article,Artisteer, and a clip art library.
I’m going to chime in because I’ve built my own personal CMS used on nearly 100 websites. I spent a lot of time considering Joomla and Drupal for my purposes. Of course DNN was on the radar screen as well. The thing that must be said is so much depends on your goal and what you are trying to achieve. I’m currently working on a contract for more than 350 websites in which each will have between 10 – 30 pages of content when complete… launched with 4 – 10 pages. So I did a lot of hard research trying to find the CMS that would best fit MY goals.
Platform wise was not a consideration. PHP or C# or VB was not as important as finding the most appropriate CMS. When you are building 350+ sites you are in a spot that is a lot different than if you are building one. For one website i would say right from the beginning that DNN would not be my pick.
To keep this from getting long I will go ahead and say i definitely had ruled out DNN at a point in my research. The skinning being the main thing as with 350+ sites it was going to kill us with how tedious it is. Joomla started to be in high consideration but it’s not real multi-portal out of the box. You need add-ons. And even the best add-ons were contrived. But that was the way we were heading. we need multi-portal functionality for my purposes. 350+ databases was not a consideration. 350+ codebases in different sites.. not a consideration.
But then something changed everything. That was a product called Artisteer. If you don’t know what it is then download the demo and check it out. It’s brilliant. But the point is that it allows you to make skins for all the top CMS products including DNN. So that is how DNN made it back on the radar and finally ended up being the solution. Adding an entire new site from a registered domain to up and running takes about 3 minutes. A skin can be created in Artisteer and uploaed in anywhere from 5 – 8 minutes. So in less than 15 minutes we have a working site ready to add content to. Because the skins can be easily swapped out later it’s not critical to get it perfect before moving on to creating content. We purchased News Articles by Verterin and it has taken us to the end goal and met all the objectives of our 350+ site project. Total cost out of pocket… $25 for all 350+ sites. Considering we are looking at around $500 per site, and the client is EXTREMELY happy with the results and that they can edit the content once we are done this has been a huge win for us. We focus 90% of our effort on content and a few graphics in the skins. With all the other CMS’s we looked at there is just no way we could be moving as fast as we are now simply because DNN rules on multi-portal site launches. You just can’t beat getting a new site up and running in 3 minutes… even if it just has the DNN skin to get started.
If we had to do the skinning manually or buy skins… DNN would be non-starter. If we were doing ecommerce… DNN would be a non-starter. If we were needing top quality site design.. DNN/Artisteer combination would not be a good fit. But this project is about content,not looking pretty.. and it’s about hundreds of websites…For that the Artisteer/DNN combination was a homerun. We will have all done by middle of April on a project we had anticipated and even time budgeted would take us until October.
At the same time I completely agree so much with what the original author posted about DNN. I absolutely hated it for so many reasons. But sometimes your goal and what you are trying to accomplish changes your perceptions. Joomla was tempting but the multi-portal aspects were very limiting. Most other CMS’s would have either required 350+ databases or we would have had databases with thousands of tables with _SITENAME extensions in front of their names. And that is another benefit. Having all the data in one database works well when it is 350 sites with 10 – 50 pages of content. We can leverage that down the road. and there are tricks. We must ping the sites at least once every 10 minutes or so to keep the sites live. If you let the site fall asleep it falls out of memory and takes 10 – 12 seconds to come up. We also have an advantage that because they are all under one install an upgrade will take all the sites with them at the same time. As there is only one real ‘install’ we don’t deal with all the pain that would be associated with dealing with 350 CMS installs. That would be nightmarish with ANY CMS and I could not even fathon dealing with DNN in that regard.
We have already discussed with the client the limitations of DNN. They have agreed that if a site gets more than 5k+ a day in traffic (and is of course making them money on their affiliate programs, adsense, and information products) it will be rebuilt from the ground up and moved to a separate production server. We are taking what we are learning from DNN to build a new lightweight CMS that will be specific to these sorts of projects.
So I will conclude that I had completely written off DNN as a heaping pile. But the more I’ve worked with it with the specific project the better it fit and we are very happy with the results.
Dean, you should read Tony Arnold’s comments on this post. His is a much better prototype for your article. You may have some good points, but they are lost in what becomes an angry, unfocused rant regarding some grudge you have with some guy about some discussion in the past that no one else knows or cares about.
Tony’s explanation of the issues, problems, and concerns is much more succinct and mature.
Hi Matt, thanks for your feedback, you appear to have missed the point — this IS a rant, I said that quite clearly right at the beginning.
DotNetNuke is a powerful framework and includes features you can’t find in WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. It’s plain stupid to blame an app because you can’t spend some time to learn how to get the best out of it.
Some would say features, many would consider bugs…poor programming architecture.…slow development processes.…. What would you say are the “features” in DNN that cant be found in other CMS systems (ie take for instance umbraco, sitefinity, sitecore..)
LOL — A W3 validation of the DNN Forum Page highlights just 1058 errors (not 10, not 58, but ONE THOUSAND AND FIFTY EIGHT ERROR on just one DNN page, says it all really) and 13 warnings. Thats really reassuring — NOT.
Couldnt agree more, I have developed websites using different CMS setups including Mambo/Joomla, Drupal, Modx, Silverstripe, Typo3, Umbraco among others, Custom built CMS in both PHP and ASP.Net. While each of these systems have their own issues, I have never worked with a system with so many flaws as DNN, for example:
* Outdated skinning system where DNN spits out its own HTML controls, any modern CMS should not autogenerate html code.
* Slow, Slow, And Slow.……sure there are steps to improve it, caching etc with PageBlaster and other tweaks but seriously in comparison to other CMS’s its a joke.
* Convoluted module development.. ..
I have only being working with DNN for a short time however can already see some serious deficiencies with this garbage. I would advise any sane developers to steer clear of it at all costs unless you have large budgets and time to spend with fixing it. I know someone would say its because I havent spent the time to understand it, and configure it optimally, or its because of bad 3rd party modules etc, etc, but why should we, if we can produce better results in significantly less time with better (not just different) systems .…. ok well how about we put up some comparisons.
How about: Building some Websites from scratch with DNN and Other CMS’s, using any particular template/design. Grab an experienced developer who has no experience with DNN and see what they would pick up, see how long it takes, how easy it is to build custom functionality for the website.. how user-friendly the administration areas are for end users.… how simple it is to deploy.…bearing in mind that time is money, and quality results matter.… how seo friendly the site is, how well the site validates, speed the site renders at… designers and developers working on the same site at once…
It’s like one of those monsters that started early and has just kept going on and on, dragging itself along…
DNN could be good software, all they need to do is scrap the current codebase and rebuild from scratch, completely Re-Engineer it, its about time to catch up to others…of course then they would need to rename it.
Ok, now that I have been working a little more with DNN, I find that it is even worse than before, for example building skins is a complete mess, using a single default page to include html headers and doctypes across multiple portals is just plain stupid…
And the amount of junk that dnn outputs to the page from a clean template is pathetic.
The more I work with it, the more frustrated I get with it.…how can anything be so bad, and than get worse as you start to learn it better.….at least with other systems, it generally gets better as you learn them.
DotNetNuke is utter shit! The software is a bloated, unfriendly, overcomplicated, slow piss stain and the staff who support the product are liars.
That’s harsh — and it’s incorrect if you do things the right way. I have been using this software for the last 6 years or so.
However, what I can say is badly designed third party modules, bloated skins and inexperience can lead to problems, as does hosters who sneakily cripple the build to maximise how many they can run on a single box.
And since you didn’t bother to put in any public contact details how do we know you aren’t simply trolling the posts and being antagonistic?
Easy to complain behind an anonymous wall ..
Nina Meiers
I’ve read and agree with a lot of what is written here and disagree with some too. What is the holy grail CMS that is proposed in the article and comments, because I seem to have missed it? Please don’t say Drupal and WordPress. If you are going to tell me you would actually put a corporate intranet on PHP/MYSQL then I understand I need to move on to the next blog post.
And yet PHP/MySQL (or any combination of open source language and database server) drive sites that are far, far larger and more widely used than any corporate intranet (Flickr is a good example). PHP is not my chosen language, but assuming that C#/.NET will do a better job is just silly — bad code and bad design exist in all areas of programming, and I’m personally finding .NET to have some shining examples of awfulness (probably because the barrier to entry is lowered by it being Windows-based).
Language bigotry is about as useful as platform bigotry — it’s a tool — any tool used the wrong way will produce bad results.
Personally, I consider the “holy grail” of corporate intranet to be Jive SBS — http://www.jivesoftware.com/. It’s not cheap, but it’s got all the bells and whistles to do the job right. Unlike DotNetNuke, which has the bells and whistles but falls apart at the drop of a hat.
Tony beat me to it, but suggesting PHP/MYSQL is a bad idea for a corporate intranet is probably the sort of mentality that leads to “things” like DotNetNuke being created in the first place. Someone saw PHPNuke (which itself was a pile of rubbish last time I looked) and thought, “if we write something like this in .NET it’ll be much better.” Yeah, no.
And what exactly is your problem with WordPress, no I wouldn’t use it for a corporate intranet, but I would use it for a corporate blog. And if you’re reason is “because its PHP/MYSQL”, well, then I’m not sure what to say. WordPress.com seems to go just fine and they run millions of blogs, and serve millions of page views… which like Tony said is far, far larger than any corporate intranet will ever be.
Man you are funny!! I laughed so much when I read this. Loved it!! Loved it!! Loved it!!
I do have a couple of things to say -
DNN is a good workable product
I have upgraded websites using DNN from DNN 3 > 5 so am duly qualified to throw in my two cents worth!
I don’t write code at all and can’t program my way out of problems, so it’s imperative that DNN must work for me out of the box, not ignoring the fact it’s hurt sometimes.
You made this blog a while ago (where have you been in my life???) this tweeted comment hit my tweet deck and I couldn’t resist reading it and glad I did!
DNN is is a good product, in fact when running, configured and correctly setup, incredibly rock solid which, let me tell you, from my perspective of not having in house developers, wondered if it would leave me high and dry, but it’s been great. There is a learning curve, but we’re doing more management for people who can’t work out their joomla sites and I’ve rarely if ever had this issue with clients using DNN, for all it’s problems, my clients love it, even though at times we’ve to do some workarounds.
Your comments about the messages from the board, well I have to say — they do make me cringe at times. *sigh* I confess, I think it could have been handled better.
You can run dnn on a MAC — I have 2 key sites and 2 smaller ones running dnn and mac. You can’t blame DNN when it’s using the ‘free’ fckeditor. You can use Firefox on your Mac and run your site perfectly, so I don’t think that’s a fair attack. I’m not an expert in the browser engine technology but I do believe its the code from which safari was built (and chrome) that cause this issue. (Older code or something — but correct me if I’m wrong)
I pride our company on providing quality work, consideration for useability and browsers and still using and maintaining DNN as our primary solution and yet have enough sense and experience in products that are both php and .net based to consider. It might be a brave thing to say — but it’s really hard to be objective sometimes and I’m not saying there have been times when I’ve found it incredibly hard working with DNN, but over the last 12 months in particular, have found lots of people wanting to switch from other CMS product to DNN, so there are always going to be discrepancies in expectation, and all I can say is I’ve worked with this product as a ‘non developer’ and used mainly off the shelf products, and a few key modules to deliver solutions for clients and we’ve become pretty good at it.
Module Madness — wow, I have to agree, but I had this issue with wordpress too — it was fairly quick to make up something incredibly ‘plugged up’ with the plethora of ‘plug ins’ that required me to change the wp code and it was all very messy and confusing (but I’ve now learnt alot more about it and am using it for some other sites)
I loved this article .. really enjoyed reading it, but felt that I did have to take a bit of time to say — Hey look — DNN does work, I’m not a developer and have made it work, it works on a Mac, it can be compliant.. but, I can’t solve that DNN Corp issue, they have done that one all by themselves! I guess it’s the ‘defense’ mode many developers get when you dare make a comment on something, it’s inherint in their DNA perhaps? (that was a little cheeky but having had to analyse the developer personality, I now take great care in how I ‘phrase’ a question because the last thing I ever want to do is make a developer unhappy — we need them to make the internet work. :)
Thanks for this post — you made my day — in fact, when I’m feeling shitty about something DNN related, I’m gonna look at this and laugh. Consider yourself bookmarked and RSS’ed and all the other things that make me want to read your opinion!
Nina Meiers
Glad you enjoyed it. Most of my personal frustration came about because those who chose DNN for our project chose it because they had used it before and they were going to help out. They didn’t help out. It was also chosen because it could do lots of different things, which is true, however it didn’t really do anything the way that we wanted/needed it to. Instead of a social super site (which is a little bit like how it was pitched) we ended up with a glorified blog (and DNN is nowhere near being the most appropriate solution for a blog).
lol
damn.
I read your rant twice and it is SPOT ON.
I just want to respond to some of the comments made here
”. DNN is a good enough CMS that fits the needs of many website owners, from small individuals to big companies.”
No. no. no. For small companies, use plain html — for big companies, use anything else!
“…There are a crowd of clowns, and unfortunately I’m stuck developing a site because some dumb fuck thought it was the ideal platform to use,“
… same boat, buddy! (only the dumb fuck is me :( )
“Get a designer on board — DotNetNuke currently has that “this page was made and tested solely on internet explorer janky font and form control thing” going on. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Try it on a mac running Safari. And don’t get me started on the icons.”…
OMFG! OMFG!! The ICONS!! OMFG!! fat glossy globs of spit in 20 shades of black!
I thought I was trapped inside Sarah Palin’s uterus looking out at Russia!!
WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla ALL have superior admin screens and management –AND are more user friendly. In DNN — everything is on the screen AT ONCE — like an autistic childs etch a sketch-it’s ALL MODAL, but you NEVER KNOW WHAT MODE YOU ARE IN!
I’ts not open source for a reason. The real money is in providing ‘after market services’ obviously, if it were open and transparent, OTHER people would be able to provide those services NOT THEM. The reason why they don’t fix the bugs that people point out, even leaving code? ’cause then they would have code that came from other contributors and would then have a licensing issue… I’ve gone some time into this, and frankly, I’m stuck with the piece of shit..oh well…right now, it’s either gonna cost me my job, or guarantee my job security as no other developer will want to touch this nasty steaming pile
Excellent Rant, I agree with you on every point and more.
They don’t allow you to post directly to the forums until they have moderated your post. I’ve never had that issue on Drupal.
There are simple bugs in the DNN code that have been corrected by developers and posted in the forums and the issue tracker for the core team to fix. Yet they have not made it into any release. Some have been posted since 2007 and the core team are still releasing DNN versions with the bugs in it. WTF
To achieve anything in DNN you must be a) Experienced C# / VB developer, b) have lots of time to waste understanding and fixing the bugs that will stretch your patience, c) have a shit load of cash to burn on servers, because DNN on a shared hosting account is like having the Swiss Guard for your national defence, d) Have about two years and no completion date to get you project to a stage where its behaves like a professional website and e) Have great communication skills in order to deal with amateurs who think that they can design, build and sell modules that are in fact throwbacks to the web in 1998 {shit}
Then there are the actual people behind the whole DNN excuse. They spend as much time defending and talking up DNN as they do working on it. They talk up DNN as if it’s actually being used on hundreds of thousands of website (a search on Google will answer that bullshit).
Finally just to nail it, I read this post from 2007 by John Mitchell, a module developer who has developed one of the must have modules for DNN, (because it cleans up a lot of the bullshit, outdated, unprofessional html code) about how the “DNN Corp” asked him to get lost, but wanted him to make our like he was the one deciding to leave.
http://blogs.snapsis.com/PermaLink,guid,f7cd028a-a5bb-45f4-8dbb-23fbbf7a5d18.aspx
There are a crowd of clowns, and unfortunately I’m stuck developing a site because some dumb fuck thought it was the ideal platform to use, that was two years ago and we are still pissing into the wind, I’d have had 20 Drupal based sites up and running with the same complexity in that amount of time.
If anyone ever wondered why Microsoft treats DNN as nothing more than a group of amateurs acting out their fantasies, this post by Dean should answer it.
I’m just glad I’m not the only one out there sick of the bullshit from these guys.
P.S: Won’t post my name, considering how personally DNN they take harsh critiques. They’d probably never answer any of my questions.
P.P.S: Even some of the main developers don’t use DNN for their own websites, which says it all!
Hey I used my own nick here as well. I also posted a link to this on the main dotnetnuke forum, there are some comments there as well. You can click on my name to go there
heh, thanks for posting to DNN forums, I will keep an eye on the thread to see what people say :)
As a long time IBS DotNetNuke developer I can understand your sentiment and you do have a nr of valid points.
I use the DNN as a framework framework but inside have my own additional development framework for modules, a 3rd party semantically correct templatable menu system and various replacements for dnn core modules. I recently converted a css grid framework to be used in dnn environment http://www.dnngrid960.com.
So I do understand the arguments but instead of complain about is I just find better solutions for the things that im not completely satisfied with. 3rd party or custom build.
There are several good 3rd party modules that are much better than there core equivalences but also the garbage html output fo the forums and the incomplete rendering of tables has made me switch to 3rd party as well, You cant sell that to your clients. Especially clients that are going to pay for the PE version in the near future
As a portal framework its perfect and handles almost anything I use it for or I can adapt too. But the all in one solution can not satisfy everyone especially compared to dedicated forum or blog module or solution developers.
Hey man.
Funny. I was thinking of writing a DNN rant the other day. I would have titled it “Not Good Enough”. Seriously, you beat me to this.
I just started using DNN at the recommendation of a coworker, for a charity site that I’m helping out. I feel like an ass for recommending it, I must say. Once I started developing, I was absolutely destroyed by how bad the system is. I could go on and on and on about DNN’s crappy model, but nothing says just how bad the system is as much as the documentation. It’s worse than terrible. It’s worse than non-existent. It’s patently false in a lot of areas, because it’s so old.
If you have misleading documentation, but you supposedly have an API and a front-end programming model, you have NO PRODUCT. DNN is simply not good enough. I feel like a fool for using it and proposing it as a solution to the charity I’m working for.
Although there are valid points in this article, the overall tone is obviously driven from the author’s experience with one or more specific DNN guys.
Anyway, DNN is not the key to the web paradise but it’s not that bad as the author of this article wants to make it appear either. DNN is a good enough CMS that fits the needs of many website owners, from small individuals to big companies.
As a relatively new CMS developer, I have experienced several open-source cms options and to date, although Joomla, etc are MUCH cheaper to run, DNN does feel much more user-friendly — not just from the developers point of view but also because it does not require technical knowledge by the administrator. I have recently worked on Joomla for example (which seems to be the cheap, suit any ‘SME business requirement’ option — so I am led to believe by many SME business advice organisations) however, I found it an absolute horror of a cms to work with — it all seems a bit back-to-front and the administration seems to be a whole different entity from the user end — unlike DNN where it really does feel more like ‘What You See Is What You Get’ — which is what the SME administrator is looking for. I have managed to get the core DNN W3C compliant for CSS and XHTML although would obviously prefer that it came out of the box this way. Unfortunately, the modules that come with the cms are not W3C compliant — again, this is something that I am hoping will be addressed at some point. I have no problems integrating bespokely designed ‘skins’ that provide a professional look to the site — although I do agree that if you are expecting to leave the default skin in place — it’s not a good design at all, is there an open-source cms that does come with a good default design without having to pay any more? I would be interested to know your thoughts on what is a good all-round open-source cms — as I stated at the begining, I am relatively new to the whole cms game and would like to experience the good as well as the bad and the ugly.
Disclaimer: Dean and I work together, and I’m an avid mac user and open source supporter. I’m also pretty idealistic about my technology choices. Thar’ be opinions in tha’ comment ahead, yarr!
@S Dale: I think you raise an interesting point — I don’t believe there are any good “all round” CMS products left — at least not in the same sense as DotNetNuke. The old PHPNuke-style products seem to have all but disappeared — and I think for good reason:
Trying to be all things to all people is a great way to make sure you fail. Especially when you do none of them very well.
I think people who are new to the industry, or only interested in turning things around quickly turn to products like DNN to make their life easier — but it’s a double edged blade — you’re basically peddling a half-baked solution so you can move along to your next job. Personally, I’d never put DNN in front of any of my clients after using it for the last few months.
I won’t disagree that products like Joomla and Drupal are more difficult to use than DNN — the model that DNN uses for its admin and edit screens is sound (and could be great) — but it’s the quality of the product and the somewhat inactive community that’s in question here. I’ve had the same experiences as Dean with DNN — perhaps we’re both too accustomed to how things work on the *NIX side?
I second Dean’s comments about DNN focusing on getting better — in my opinion, DotNetNuke needs to do the following things to even survive the die off of the *Nuke products:
/Rant off. Hopefully the DNN guys will read this article and these comments and use it as impetus to up the ante.
You raise some interesting/hilarious points.
I have to agree with the nested tables point. What year is it?!
Also, you don’t add a xhtml doctype to your page to just be “fashionable”, it actually means that you are writing xhtml markup.
I stick with Dotnetnuke, I can do outsource work sometime and I feel comfortable with any requirement of a website that can be done fine with DNN, (XHTML, good document management… many of things). The admin interface of DNN is quite urgly compared with thats in other CMS, but that only minor point. Sharepoint service site is another option . I like wordpress sites but not joomla, or drupal. They are nothing superious than Dotnetnuke.
As a standards developer who was “forced” to go DNN because the powers that be chose this framework. And it has to be said that indeed the framework as a while is good to work with and with a combination of both skins and custom skinobjects a lot of the dnn flaws can be worked aound.
It seemed that dnn was taking itself more seriously and was beginning be be taken more serious amongst other frameworks as well since finally they understood the meaning of standards development as I was accustomed to developing templates and template frameworks for Joomla and WordPress amongst others.
So great was my expectation when i heard DNN was setting up a skin contest to promote “good” skinning. After extending the deadline only 25 skins were submitted ( considering that there are bundles and bundles of skin developer that seek skins on the official marketplace http://www.skincovered.com — most of them are crap and still use tables for layout instead of for where they are meant for tabular layout of data.
So where did the community go, lots and lots of developers but only 25 skins were submitted. Strangely DotNetNuke team members were not prohibited form entering so there were 2 member that helped with the skin contest but also had a skin in every category ( someone named salaro and someone names cuongdang)
But again that was ( strangely enough not against the rules) but now for the real joke. They selected 3 judges that I never heard of to judge this, none of them have well designed dnn websites or are well known just some random techie guys and one that had a flash site that did not look that fancy either
Cant say too much about the community favorite since that’s a design chosen by the community and to be honest it looks interesting, not my choice but its a well designed skin nonetheless/
Lets go to the real categories which were “supposed” to be judged but the “well known” judges. Each of the categories where supposed to be judged to certain criteria http://skins.dotnetnuke.com/Judging/tabid/57/Default.aspx
And this is where DNN was brought back 10 years, The actually let skins win that had MULTIPLE nested TABLES. In the business category not only did the first place and the runner up both had tables in there design but one of the skin developers was salaro ” the one that was in the core team so he should promote the use of good skinning, This salaro has a website which sells run of the mill skin which looks like they were designed by cheap offshore developers nothing fancy or creative about that. And he is in the core team. they must have low selection standards for the core team as they have for the judges. From 20% and up there was technical standards and education, well if nested tables are technical and educational in the dnn world I have to get to convince my boss to go for some other framework.
The first on in the business category that actually is developing the way it should be is the 3rd place he has commented html, css and uses a modified 960.css framework. The first one that actually looks like a non dnn skin and the first one to have no nested tables and validates. So judging by there own 20% educational technical rule the nested table skins should have been eliminated right away, that hot how you design anymore.
The personal category was just another joke, they selected the worst design possible a general 3 column layout with a few more functions and subskins and some crappy designed trees ( how creative ) and yet again nested tables — How technical of you dnn. Yet another one that won with nested table compared to a much nicer one more creative one more standard one from a designer called slumtown hero.
Now lets go to modern web standards of course here they should ban tables you think, but think again a few nested tables ( in MODERN STANDARDS — dnn must have rely low modern standard compared to the normal web community. So first place is for a crappy designed website with tables, now lets go the second one ( this one is from the dnn team member who also participated 0 still weird in my opinion )
And finally a winner that has no tables, woohoo :)
So to sum it up dnn promotes good skinning by using nested tables, there own team mates have winning entries. The salaro guy 2 times second place and the cuongdang guy one time first place. This alone is very weird in my eyes and im glad I decided not to enter this competition.
Its pretty well possible to make great dnn skins ( non dnn looking ) as some of the entrants have shown in both business and personal and slumtown here with the monster skin actually has in the demo content of his skin and the locks entry which not suited too many since it limited in nr of items and content its still a nice and clean look.
So im back to persuading my boss to get off the dnn band wagon but altho the skinning contest was another missed dnn opportunity here is who I think should have won based on there own rules.
Anyone that have used tables in there design should have been eliminated, there own teammates should not have been allowed to participate to begin with. Its nice that they entered to beef up the nr of submitted skins because if you look at it there were a nr of entries that were done by same person or company
4 were done by 2 of the team members both actually won something ( which leaves a foul taste in my mouth just to begin with ) adn then there were some template builders who if you look at there own site have nested tables skins and promote these ans xhtml w3c skins which is another joke by itself.
But I can keep on rambling on this weird and strange skin contest but here are my winners based on there own judging criterias
modern business Schwingsoft
Personal : slumtown here
modern web standards : dnngarden html 5 css 3 technical excellence so why this one didnt won based on this alone is a riddle to me
out of the box: this is the only one they had right and it didn’t have a table, the judges must have dozed off there and actually made one good call.
Well this is the end of my ramblings, im back to finish of this clients skin and persuade my boss to drop dnn and the skinning contest gives me leverage because it seems after all these years the standards and skin framework part of dnn is still a joke in the portal framework world.