Dotnetnuke … thought I’d take a look at what seems to be the only major .net open source content management.

First impressions – installed pretty easily with no snags. A few changes to web.config and away.

Then logging at finding my way around the user levels – took a bit but not too bad.

Then the fun began. First goal to get a web page with editable content. Without wishing to read the 1000 page of pdfs, I missed the fact that you have to download modules to do pretty much anything in the CMS, including adding editable text regions. Once
I figured this, though I was able to setup the first page.

Styling the page was a battle though, needing to work out how collections and skins worked was not too obvious, and things I take for granted with other CMSs seemed quite tricky. My overall impression was just to create a basic site that had the required HTML output was difficult.

The fact that the modules are all written by different people and seem to have little consistency is not so good. They seem to have interesting features but really need someone to make sure they work in the same way.

The major drawback I came up against was styling the modules. They output their own code, such as for the module to edit HTML outputs buttons to open and close regions and print regions. Similarly I couldn’t find a way to remove graphics on the menu. I didn’t want these, but couldn’t find an easy way to get rid of them without editing the source.

The second major drawback is that these guys don’t seem to have heard of w3 compliance … the modules were especially bad for this.

6 hours to setup a 6 page test site … roll on version 3