For my work here I have been getting into DNN as a content management system and portal builder. Some observations:
- It is not at all easy to install and configure. Here there have been problems with Vista and IIS 7.0.
- Once installed it is easy to start building a portal. However I have had problems with some of the standard modules. For example Feed Explorer is a nightmare. It is very cool but cannot handle OPML files unless they are in the specific format they require. URL encoding doesn’t seem to work – EMM RSS feeds fail because they contain an & sign, which even if escaped fail to load, whereas copying the same file to anther site with a simple URL works. I also have the feeling this particualr core module is commercial as whenever there is an error it doesn’t tell you but defaults to view DNN marketplace for sales.
- Modules we like and seem powerful are “user defined tables” “repository (archives of documents)” “reports” – simple SQL queries.
- In comparison to say Drupal I would say that this system is commercial first and open source second. There appear to be some very powerful modules for database interfaces including customised forms – but these cost over 100 dollars – assuming that is they work.
- The performance of DNN at least on my portable is not very good. Perhaps there are some tuning parameters to improve things . Drupal comes with an inbuilt caching system which is an easier solution, and outperforms DNN even running locally.
