Greetings everyone,

We have a specific project we're specing out, and I'd really appreciate your thoughts about DNN's ability to compare with Drupal for several key points. We're comparing DNN and Drupal because we have complete flexibility over the technology, and it seems fair to compare what seem to be the two biggest CMSs for both .Net and PHP. Here are our specifications:

•    Proven longevity and support
•    Support for Section 508 Compatible Themes and Visuals
•    Support for w3c XHTML strict valid and CSS compliance
•    Multiple Language Support
•    Ease and expense of extensibility (availability of programmers to help extend the framework for custom design)
•    Ability to easily configure and integrate additional database tables (including QuickBase) and custom calendar management
•    Ability to create public/private calendars, and calendaring for different communities and/or event topics
•    Ability to easily integrate Ning and/or other external communities

On all counts, both DNN and Drupal seem capable. What would you all suggest for choosing DNN (besides that it's great!) over Drupal in this case? Is the .Net framework more capable to handle our tasks? What about DNN? Your thoughts are really valued!

--Dave

Naturally, my opinion would be biased.  But sometimes a third party reference helps (though individual circumstances matter).

The folks at Penton Media (http://www.penton.com/) struggled with the same choice.  They had both DNN & Drupal projects in house (in fact much more Drupal).   After their own internal reviwew, they chose to consolidate on DotNetNuke for all future development (and eventual migration of existing projects).

Capabilities of the .Net platform, as well as depth of application features in DotNetNuke (plus ability to customize) were, I believe, the primary drivers.

Cheers

Scott Willhite, Co-Founder DNN

 
Echo-ing Jeff's reply:  Both DNN and Drupal are quite capable and mature and both are probably capable of meeting your needs as long as you have the appropriate admin/programming resources to support/extend the chosen platform.  Drupal and DNN both feature user group/forum membership numbering in the hundreds of thousands and a wealth (thousands) of available core and third party modules.  DNN seems to have greater numbers overall but keep in mind that many forum members are now inactive and a great number of third-party modules only work on old (unsupported) versions of DNN.

DNN is my personal choice of framework as it most closely coincides with my skillset. 

A year ago I would have cited Mambo as a viable option (Joomla was spawned from Mambo) as Mambo is also a fairly mature open-source framework.  However, the Mambo team announced this past year that Mambo will be completely re-written based on CakePHP (think Ruby-On-Rails) which, though nice, is not nearly as mature as DNN or Drupal.  Due to this, Joomla is probably the next best consideration (though my general impression is that it's something of a cleaned-up, dumbed-down version of Mambo).