It is the site of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. It contains almost 2000 pages and receives 100-200,000 hits per month.

It is in 3.2.2 and we plan to upgrade it to 4.6 in the fall. It has actually been up for nearly a year but I wanted to share it with you all and perhaps receive some suggestions for improvements.

Some thoughts on the site and the experiment with our first DNN site:

• The core search, as well Xepient proved inadequate so we went with freefind.com as found on this page. Not a very clean solution but it gets the job done. The core search needs to be able to search all kinds of files (pdf, doc) as well as within certain directories only as well as within directories outside of the DNN portal.
• The store on the site is outside the DNN portal as well. It is from our template-based store found here. The DNN store module is not ready for prime time and we found the Catalook product way too complicated.
• The optin email system is also outside the portal, a product like iContact. We tried DataSprings optin system but the MOFGA list is nearly 4000 and our discountasp.net account allows only 1000 emails to be sent out per day. I assume that is the same for most ISPs. It is also much more stable and easier for clients to use.
• I created an end user's guide that has helped the clients to deal with the site.

The bottom line is that the site works really well, the client is thrilled, but it is kind of 'cobbled together' in that the main things that would be nice to have within the DNN portal: search; commerce; optin email are not. I hope this points out the need for more solid offerings in these areas rather than our shortcomings ;).

I welcome any comments and suggestions on mofga.org as well as on the comments I have posted here.

UPDATE

I have replaced the search engine on this page with Google CSE.

Why? It allows searching of the entire site, as in this instance. Plus you can do a limited search, like in this case - where what I want to do is have it search an area of the site with 'outside the portal' htm files plus many files newly added to the newspaper section 'inside the portal'.

Google CSE also allows a nonprofit the option not to display ads in the results which is nice. It is free, really nice, and rock solid as far as I can tell.

Will
www.planetmaine.net