

Ask HN: So what do you guys think of DotNetNuke? - wmeredith

I'm being asked to give business advice from a technical perspective (cost, ease of maintenance, etc..) to a client about their platform which is currently DNN. I've done all of my web development so far using the LAMP stack. Can you guys shed some light on DNN for me? I know a little, but HN seems to always know more than I do about, well, everything. What say you?
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weaksauce
I think the appropriate question to ask before talking about the technical
merits of various platforms is:

1\. How much content do they have in DNN already?

2\. How much of that is going to be tough to migrate out of there?

3\. What kinds of customizations have already be done in DNN?

4\. Why are they contemplating moving to a new l(a|n)(m|pg)(d|r|p) platform
and who do they know to program in these new technologies? Is that you? It
might make sense to move to a linux, nginx|apache, postgre, django|rails
platform if they want to make a website that is very custom and needs to be
fairly maleable.

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ttrashh
I'm a .Net developer and this is based on light work with it a couple years
ago so...

It wasn't great. Developing modules was confusing and overly complex. The
documentation was horrible. The data access stack was plain stupid if you
follow the "correct" way. It's written in VB.Net and many of the examples were
in VB.Net. (the VB.Net thing was a big reason I didn't continue)

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vannevar
I used DNN awhile back and it's not horrible. If they're a Microsoft shop and
the app is working and their growth is incremental, let sleeping dogs lie.

If they're bringing you in to make a clean start with the best web frameworks
available, then one of the Ruby/Python/PHP frameworks others mention would be
better IMHO.

If the answer is somewhere in the middle, you might have a look at the Castle
Project (<http://www.castleproject.org/>), which I've had some good results
with in the past.

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mahmud
Go with Drupal at least.

