My uncle has spent many years writing and maintaining his book on local wines and would like to use his accumulated and ongoing knowledge to create a website.

I am a database software developer (mainly Microsoft tools) with a little web development experience but little time to write a custom solution and there seem to be so many frameworks and content management systems out there I am sure something out of the box would be far more cost effective than starting a web development project from scratch.

I am therefore wondering if DNN might be a good way forward and whether this is the sort of framework and community where eg contracted custom development can be used to get our project started?

Things I hoped to achieve are:-

* the ability to update and store attributes and opinions of wines
* the ability to allow users to subscribe so they can reference the book and get emailed or d really like to do this for him.

cheers,
Paul Ritchie.

Yes, there are a ton of portal frameworks available. See http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ for a great listing of these.

Since you seem interested in ones that play well with Microsoft tools, you'll narrow your selection to about 3 main players the last time I checked. Unless your uncle wants to spend more money on his site than his wines, you'll want to go with DotNetNuke. It is not perfect, and does have something of a learning curve, but it is not hard to work around the occassional issues and the forums, books and other forms of support are superb. It is super flexible which can be confusing at first, but doesn't constrain you going forward.

There are lots of custom consultants out there to help you with skinning/design or module programming, but I suspect you won't even need to do any of that at first. Get your site up (hunt through these forums for good hosters, I settled on WebSecureStores.com a couple years ago and still like 'em), grab a free DNN skin (easy to find via Google) and install a few modules like the forum and repository module and you'll be a long way to where you want to go.

DotNetNuke: decant, serve chilled & enjoy!

Thanks guys - I really appreciate your help.

cheers,
Paul.