DotNetNuke Anyone?

[tkpeterson12]

Does anyone here use DotNetNuke? If you used it previously but went away from it, what were your reasons?

[waynehoskins]

We went away from it to a less-extreme (if at all) CMS that I've been slowly building.

Since a DNN site is completely database-driven, it relies on the relational integrity of the tables. Somehow ours got sufficiently screwed up to work not well, at the relational level. The link text is "map to church", the link itself is actually "/index.php?pageid=461", and that takes you not to church map, but to the page about our elders.

That's why we jumped ship: it was easier to build it fresh than to try to fix the tables' relational integrity. What I've been working on is more nearly static in terms of mechanics: some content that changes regularly (like the list of sermons) is database-driven, but it doesn't rely on the database to run the mechanics of the site.

If we were to do it now (this is two years ago we did this), I would probably jump to Joomla rather than try to roll my own. Actually, I might first try to poke around with the linking between tables and see if I could straighten the DNN site out.

That was us; we're probably an anomaly.

[tkpeterson12]

Originally Posted by waynehoskins

We went away from it to a less-extreme (if at all) CMS that I've been slowly building.

Since a DNN site is completely database-driven, it relies on the relational integrity of the tables. Somehow ours got sufficiently screwed up to work not well, at the relational level. The link text is "map to church", the link itself is actually "/index.php?pageid=461", and that takes you not to church map, but to the page about our elders.

That's why we jumped ship: it was easier to build it fresh than to try to fix the tables' relational integrity. What I've been working on is more nearly static in terms of mechanics: some content that changes regularly (like the list of sermons) is database-driven, but it doesn't rely on the database to run the mechanics of the site.

If we were to do it now (this is two years ago we did this), I would probably jump to Joomla rather than try to roll my own. Actually, I might first try to poke around with the linking between tables and see if I could straighten the DNN site out.

That was us; we're probably an anomaly.

Thanks for the reply. Joomla seems to have a much larger following and more/better modules available which is why I evenam considering moving to it. The one thing about DNN that you can't seem to do in Joomla (at least not without a lot of hacks) is is multiple security groups.

[Sysmom]

I've played with Joomla and Drupal this year - I am an old PHP Nuke and PostNuke fan from 199something. Before that, I did roll my own CMS.

Currently, I'm playing with WordPress at a new site I built for someone. And I'm rather liking it. I am probably going to attempt the re-design of our church site with WordPress later this year.

Joomla and Drupal suffer from some of the same issues that plagued the first and subsequent generations of *Nukes; they all are jargon-heavy, user-unfriendly, and while touting the plug'n'play benefits of a CMS, they just don't seem to me to be for code-challenged people.

The big blog sites, on the other hand, seem to have been able to make a dent (not an inroad...) in some of these user-friendly issues. My vision of the web has long been that ordinary people, without a technical background, let alone having to learn PHP (or anything, for that matter) could just put a web site up, have it work like they wanted, and have the website look great.

If Grandmas are starting to figure out how to make a Blog at Blogger, or WordPress, then maybe there is some hope for this all to come to fruition.

All this to say that I think the {free and inexpensive} CMSes still have a long ways to go to live up to their potential and their promise.

Web developers and designers are not going to be replaced anytime soon.

deb

[nathandiehl]

Originally Posted by tkpeterson12

Thanks for the reply. Joomla seems to have a much larger following and more/better modules available which is why I evenam considering moving to it. The one thing about DNN that you can't seem to do in Joomla (at least not without a lot of hacks) is is multiple security groups.

fyi, Joomla! can do multiple security groups (access levels) with a 3rd party addon extension.
Check out some of the options here: http://extensions.joomla.org/index.p...1782&Itemid=35

Good Luck!

[AV Guy]

First off, I'm not a real web guy, but the church's site does fall under me. A couple of years ago we moved from Front Page(!) to a dot net nuke site put together by a volunteer. It has worked okay, but we're moving away from it to what we haven't decided at this point. It has had it's little quirks that were frustrating to volunteers who would wind up calling me with problems and I'd just take care of it myself. One guy called me to say he just deleted the whole web site. He had, but I was able to recover it pretty easily.

The WYSWIG has been like using MS Word to create a polished print piece, it's almost doable, but can be very frustrating to make things look exactly like you want. We also need to find new hosting, but not all support DNN.

We're looking at having a site professionally done and using Contribute or something robust to maintain it. We currently use ACS church management software and may use their AccessACS product to give us a nice members section.

[tkpeterson12]

Originally Posted by nathandiehl

fyi, Joomla! can do multiple security groups (access levels) with a 3rd party addon extension.

Thanks for the link. DNN just seems to handle this a lot better with the default "out of the box" build. Admittedly, this could simply be due to my familiarity with DNN.

[kick-ice]

Our church uses DNN and I couldn't ask for a better system. I have even installed DNN on my personal server for testing a design purposes. I will admit the cms interface was a small learning curve, but it is quite the powerful machine. Installing my own cms was a good learning experience. It helps to be familiar with whatever db backend you decide to use as some parts of the install can be slightly tricky to the inexperienced. Overall, though, the system is very smooth. I have chatted with an individual who had a large hand in the development of DNN and I must say that I have not been disappointed.

[tkpeterson12]

Originally Posted by kick-ice

Our church uses DNN and I couldn't ask for a better system. I have even installed DNN on my personal server for testing a design purposes. I will admit the cms interface was a small learning curve, but it is quite the powerful machine. Installing my own cms was a good learning experience. It helps to be familiar with whatever db backend you decide to use as some parts of the install can be slightly tricky to the inexperienced. Overall, though, the system is very smooth. I have chatted with an individual who had a large hand in the development of DNN and I must say that I have not been disappointed.

Thanks for the reply. As a .Net developer, I'm very familiar with DNN, the underlying database and the code to make it all work. My problem is time...I just don't have the time to do all of the things that I would like to do using it.

In my opinion, the biggest advantage of one of the PHP based systems (Joomla in particular) is the abundance of free modules that are available. What I would have to spend time writing in DNN is freely available in Joomla.

[kick-ice]

Does anyone know of a

[kick-ice]

Does anyone know of a module similar to xmod that is available for free? I am trying to play with data manipulation at the page level and xmod is a beautiful tool for that but I wouldlike to try something free first.

[abramsji]

I realize your post is old. However, we have been using dotnetnuke CMS on our church site. I am a consultant and a member of this church www maranatha-cog dot org. Here I install Dotnet to get the staff and some members to get involve in this web ministry. The common user with little or no programming experience find it fun to simply contribute to the website. Most user's enjoy working with the modules for the church visitors who visit the website and use the module to view schedules, sign up for events, etc. Take a peak on how I got the website up and what skins and images I used and included an xml flash banner that I can customize with Photoshop and upload. In the near future, I am adding Facebook like profiles, so users who sign up can enjoy a Facebook style login experience. I hope this helps those considering CMS. The host its own server and they have a reasonable bandwidth. We will soon be looking to stream live Sunday services through a Flash server. Using DotNet was time consuming getting up online but after that, It worked great. We have several church staff members now involve in the websites. Thanks--