We're a .gov looking at .net nuke. What are the pros/cons of DNN in regards to:

 - Accessible Front End UI

 - Accessible Back End UI

 - Standards compliant markup (full control of HTML output?)

 - CSS layout support

We tried SharePoint's CMS features and they pretty much fail at all the above.

That said, the DotNetNuke.com site doesn't appear that great, either. For instance:

 - the top drop-down navigation is completely inaccessible. It's entirely dependant on javascript and doesn't produce any actual HREFs to enable folks to open the site in a new tab, for instance.

 - The site uses CSS, but also still has a lot of tables for the main page layout.

Are the above two issues a universal problem with DNN, or are they both circumventable with a bit of work (and are only that way on this site due to oversight or just because of the particular template/menu system they chose).

Bottom line is that I'm trying to find out how flexibel DNN is. Sharepoint is highly INflexible. You have ONE menu system to choose from. CSS is HUGE challenge as the back end system writes a lot of custom CSS that is a real pain to override. I don't want another sharepoint on my hands. ;o)

Thanks, Brian.

I assume a competent front end person (HTML, CSS, Javascript) could make their own Skin and menu in any shape/form they want? If so, cool!

(Note to the DotNetNuke.com team: you might want to consider a revamp of this skin. The first thing I do when looking at CMS offerings is look at the source code of the company's site. A complete CSS template + accessible menu would go a long way towards first impressions)

"In terms of accessibility, many of the controls, especially from the admin angle, use Javascript postbacks"

OUCH! Is this surmountable? I absolutely can't have javascript postbacks on our public web site. I'm OK with code, though. How is the 'site navigation' spit out of DNN? Can I grab an XML stream or the like?

Ideally, I'd have pure HTML lists for navigation that point to actual URIs (as opposed to postbacks) that we'd then style via CSS Javascript. Is that doable? Practical?

"The most pervasive and frustrating example of this is the standard events modules - all calendar cells are postback links, and there are not accessible alternatives."

Crap. This is a real bummer.

"However I would imagine that you could build a small module which at leasts lists all calendar events in an accessible way..."

Well, maybe this discussion is going off in a tangent now. Can you give me a high-level explanatino of how one grabs data from DNN? Let's say I wanted to write my own calendar that avoids postbacks and replaces it with querystrings. I know VB.net and visual studio. How can I 'receive' the calendar data from DNN? Would be be directly querying the data via documented table structure? Is there an API? XML stream? (Apologies if these are really basic questions...feel free to tell me to RTFM... ;o)

On the plus side, if we build our own modules, I could finally contribute back to the Open Source world. ;o)