This is a about a 3rd party module I recommend you take a look at. My intention is not to shamelessly plug the module but to help you out - you really ought to take a look at this as it could go a long way to resolving your concern about DNN as a platform for your university site.

If you are serving a lot of pages to unauthenticated users (i.e. you don't require everyone to register and log in to gain access to the site) then I have found you can get a huge performance boost by using the Snapsis PageBlaster HTTP module. There is a free version and a commercial version. The underlying engine in both is the same, the commercial version just provides more control and options. The module caches and compresses pages for unauthenticated users which means that the pages are generated quicker by the webserver and the amount of data being sent over the internet is smaller. This goes a long way towards eliminating the two main reasons why DNN sites are often experienced as slower than "hand coded" sites - the DNN application and database dynamically renders every page on each request (i.e. instead of simply serving already existing files), and pages often contain more HTML than if a human had written the HTML by hand. Yes, DNN performance has increased a lot in recent versions, and yes DNN contains its own caching and compression engine, but PageBlaster works at a more fundamental level than these and in my experience gives a better performance boost.

I run a number of e-commerce sites based on DNN and before discovering PageBlaster I was concerned that clients would complain about site perfomance. Using PageBlaster has completely eliminated this concern - my sites are just as responsive as the average non-DNN site.

Out of curiosity, what shopping cart module do you use for your eCommerce websites? I've been looking at CataLOOK, but it seems too DNN-ish to be userfriendly enough for some of my users, and I'm wondering if there's an easier system out there...

-shnar

You know what I mean :P

The store itself isn't so bad, it's the administration of the store. Since everything's in a portal of sorts, if you're not already familiar with how DNN works in general, then it's quite intimidating. If I were the one setting up the store, maintaining items, etc., I would have no problem. But my users who want to use this store don't really want anything to do with the admin side of DNN and seeing some of the screens scare them.

I'm not sure if there really is a way around it since it's in DNN, but I'd love to see some other alternatives...

-shnar