Very interesting conversations going on in here for sure. I'm wondering if there has been any thought at this stage about a core upgrade path from 7 to neXt. We maintain a very large site running on the Evoq Suite - Content and Social. Our community consists of thousands and is growing by the hundreds each week. We do rely on some 3rd party modules as well as some custom ones, so I understand the modules will have to be re-developed - but rebuilding our site and migrating thousands of users and conversations would be quite a disruptive effort.

My main concern right now is ensuring that we can upgrade the core from 7x to neXt. I assume that will be achievable?

At this point we don't know enough to be able to say much about an upgrade path. The hope is that there should be a fairly direct way to migrate a database from DNN 8 to DNN neXt. That said, a lot will depend on the modules in place, and there will certainly be some configuration which can't carry over directly. For third party modules, it's unclear how to best support migrating them into a new system, especially since the module will have to be rewritten anyway. But, again, we'll know more as we get into the details of how DNN neXt is put together.

You certainly aren't the only one who is going to want to move a site full of users and other important data, so I'm sure we'll have various folks at different levels solving these problems once there's a real platform to migrate to.

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Brian Dukes Engage Software St. Louis, MO 866-907-4002

DNN partner specializing in custom, enterprise DNN development.

Thanks for expressing your concerns, Vincent. You are not alone as we share them, too. DNN Corp also maintains a rather substantial site and the thought of doing a major re-write is not pleasant.

Fortunately, we are in the very early stages of the DNN.neXt project and there are a number of smart people from DNN Corp and the community working together. Pieces of the puzzle will continue to take shape throughout 2015, and will be very visible to all who are interested. We are trying to be as transparent as possible with plans and code.

As Joe Brinkman said in his blog, “Solving the Hard Things,” “DNN 8 will not be the last major release of the Web Forms based DNN Platform, but rather the continuation of a platform that we expect to support for years to come. Ultimately, DNN Corp will continue to support DNN 8 and the Web Forms based platform for as long as the community finds value in the platform and is willing to work with DNN Corp to maintain and enhance the platform.”

The point is that we all understand that, despite expected major performance gains and new functionality, users cannot simply ditch what they use today in favor of the newest cool toy. Such changes require time and resources, and often need to be done in concert with the evolution of a business. That said, we do need to move forward technologically else our community and target audience will move on to more capable tools, leaving the DNN Platform to wither away. That would help no one.

In summary, we hear your concerns and share them. We also invite you to contribute to the DNN 8 and DNN.neXt efforts as best possible. Whether submitting code, testing, writing specs, or simply commenting on direction – it’s all important. There is lots to be done and WE collectively need to move forward.