Dear Forum Members;

I discovered DNN yesterday and have watched some of the tutorials.
So I am truly a newbie!

I am a volunteer at a charitable organization. Its IT department has attempted to put up a website for the volunteer community using DNN, but without any input from the community. Apparently they are resource-strapped, and this project is very low on their priority list. They basically took DNN out of the box and spent a day or so on a few helter-skelter content pages. It is quite awful, violating most principles of good web site design, and has frustrated any volunteer who tries to use it, especially the older folk who are not particularly IT literate.

But I am both a long-term experienced volunteer in the organization and very IT-literate. I'm retired now, but used to design databases and program applications (but with old technologies).  I have kept up my skills in building desktop MS Access applications and SQL databases (with VB code behind.)  

So my first question is: How can I come up to speed with DNN so to advise the IT department how to revamp this web site?  I need to learn the "language" and capabilities of DNN so they will understand me.  I hope to meet with them in a week or so.

The second question is, given the requirements below, how difficult would this be to build in DNN?
1. Log in for volunteers and non-IT staff who will manage the content.
2. User discussion forum for volunteers (threads, replies, new thread, etc.)
3. Live calendar of organization events (query/view by users, update by staff)
4. "breaking news" information page with high priority news from staff to volunteers (daily update); links to external websites.
5. Live calendar of volunteer assignments (query/view by users, update by staff)
6. Document tree of resource material (PDF files) for download or view by volunteers, update by staff.
7. Feedback from volunteers to staff (email)

I could design the SQL database behind all this functionality, and the queries and forms (with controls) in MS Access, but have no feel for what it would take to generate in DNN.   Would it be easy for me to mock-up such a web site to demo to the other volunteers and the IT department?  (and get feedback)

The user community is small, only 200 or so, and the database size will be very small.  Performance is no issue.  Maybe 10-20 simultaneous logged-in users.

Thanks so much for your thoughts on this and sorry for the rather long post.

Hi Mark;

That is very reassuring. I've been reading more, and see that the  "events" and "user directory" modules  might do most of the heavy lifting.  I am not sure what the "skins" do - I thought they were just combinations of fonts, colors, pane layout, and that sort of thing, not functions which are performed by customizable modules. 

I have just installed IIS, SQL Server Express, and dotnet framework on my second PC, and hope that the DNN install will go smoothly. Then I can experiment with some  prototyping. I have XP running, so won't be able to get the version 7, but version 6.2.5.  I hope that will be good enough to prototype most of the functionality.

Since this is my own volunteer work for charity, I don't want to invest much money... I'd like to do as much as possible (and learn) with the free version. The organization I volunteer with has (I assume) the enterprise version.

Regards,

Rigel