Greetings all.  I am a new DNN user and am currently configuring my blog.  I have some questions and/or feature requests:

I guess the sweeping question is, can any of the following already be done, and I'm just missing it? 

• Make page title include title of the blog entry
• Categorize
• Generate a 'slug,' a direct URL that contains the title of the blog, for search engine optimization
• Tagging, tag clouds, etc. - I have seen some mentions of this possibility, but it doesn't seem to be implemented yet except as a paid addon-module for the entire DNN engine.

I realize that DNN is a full content management system, as opposed to just a blog engine.  Unfortunately, it seems that things like page naming are not particularly well integrated for search engine optimization - my url www.lowgenius.com/Hey-Im-Using-DotNetNuke-Now.aspx is going to return better results than something like www.lowgenius.com/Blog/tabid/78/EntryID/1/Default.aspx (this is actually a flaw with the entire DNN system, in my opinion - you should be able to generate short URLs with relevant names...but perhaps this is a trick that I haven't found yet). 

With the additional hit taken from lack of categorization and tagging mechanisms, I'm really wondering if I wouldn't be better off installing BlogEngine.Net in a subdirectory and using that to manage my blog entries (or just redirecting the blog 'page' on my business site to the existing blogengine, perhaps with pre-selected category, at my personal site.

I'm definitely excited about getting to know DNN, it's an incredibly versatile CMS that will allow me to quickly create attractive, easy-to-use, and easy-to-manage client sites, and I full intend to leverage it in my web design business...but this particular module is problematic in lacking these features.  Taking the page title issue, for instance, I use the AddToAny social bookmarking tool on my BlogEngine, and whenever it Diggs or Deliciouses or Reddits or Buzzes a blog entry, the page title shows up as "LowGenius | Article Title."  When I use the same tool to bookmark an entry in my DNN blog, it just titles as "[Name Of The Blog]."  This makes it more complicated for visitors to bookmark and share my blog entries, which negatively impacts my ability to leverage social bookmarking to drive traffic.

And so on.

If I'm just missing something, please feel free to tell me - I'm very new to DNN, I certainly don't know my way around it yet, and I like to think I can handle constructive criticism.

Any help will be appreciated.  For an example of the sorts of things I'm talking about, please feel free to take a look at my BlogEngine-based site at www.lowgenius.net and compare how that handles to the way DNN handles.

Hey, thanks very much for your response, Subodh.  I fully intend to stick with DNN as a CMS, as I NEED a CMS, and in the case of my business site, the Blog functionality is a secondary consideration.  Just to clarify, the choice isn't whether to keep or dump DNN entirely, just whether I'd be better off keeping my blog activity in my other, BE-driven site until the blog functionality is more robust in DNN.

I have to shame-facedly confess that I am nowhere near ready to start trying to code my own raw ASPX.  I have some high-priority gigs I'm working on right now; once that load settles a bit, I'll likely throw both DNN and BE up on test domains and start breaking them to learn.

The big sticker for me right now was the article-name-as-page-title thing.  I'm going to try out the VERY helpful link you sent and roll with that fix for now, use that for my 'professional' blogging, and we'll see what the next patch looks like.  Hopefully the 'slug' system will be implemented as well - I know that page name has a direct effect on optimization for Google, and a page with keywords in the name and a 'friendly' URL will get much more action than a long series of numbers and backslashes.

Hopefully at some point I'll get my head around this thing well enough to start making useful contributions :)

Thanks again for your help, and I'm always open to more suggestions or information!

-jh