Barbara,

I noticed your post and your current situation is very much in line with a current client of ours. My company, E-Cubed, had done a lot of work with a variety of CMS solutions over the last few years. Virtually all solutions have been using commercial software including ATOMZ, Marqui, Ektron, Contribute, Publish, etc. We've also played with several oepn source solutions including Joomla, Typo3, PHP-Nuke and DNN Nuke. We also have developed two custom Cold Fusion and ASP based solutions. We've abandoned our self-developed solutions since it is impossible to keep up with standards etc. and stay competitive. We investigated a variety of solutions for a number of clients and standardized on Marqui (SaaS) for our smaller projects and Ektron for our larger and more strategic solutions for clients that require a cornerstone type of application for strategic publishing needs.

Our research and I'd love to see what you've uncovered as well as the responses attatched to this thread are that the Open Source marketplace is dominated as you've already discovered by people with a more technical background or larger IT staffing needs. Vancouver, where we are situated, has a very strong OpenSource community and is home to some leaders in that field. I know from the various associations and events that I've attended where OS is the topic these observations are correct.

Not knocking the community as I think they are doing several things very well and in many cases much better than the 'old school' software establishment. However they are largely technically focused and the solutions tend to gravitate towards that genre.

I don't want to start a war on this topic but from reading your posts I do not see your questions being answered. We are a shop that specializes in usability and end user satisfaction. We do not typically deal with IT teams but the marketing and editors/users of the CMS system. In our history of dealing with many professional organizations of significant size who have needs that seem to parallel yours (aside from page count) they are dissatisfied with their previous CMS situations and are seeking a solid CMS solution that represents less risk as they become more and more dependant on it for bi-directional communication.

Where we have seen some success with OS CMS solutions are where a more community focused approach needs to be taken. This may or may not be what or where you are headed. Our experience in this area again is with smaller organizations that are looking for more cost efficient solutions because they are typically NFPs and others with limited or no budget and or an organization where their solution is not deemed mission critical.

Just My $.02.

Very interested in this thread as well as the other one looking at DNN for educational facilites in this forum

Kyle

I can't answer your question directly, but I can say that I am very grateful for DNN.

I have built two websites with it with myself as sole administrator and technical support, even though I have no technical or programming background at all.

I agree with those who say that upgrades and 3rd-party add-ons should be tested carefully before putting them into production, but I just assumed that was good practise in any case.  I have found the upgrades to be reasonably problem-free, so far, and I've gone through three or four minor ones.

The support here is a bit hit and miss.  On the other hand, just the other day I had someone hold my hand late into the night to help me solve a problem (thanks, aarsys), completely free of charge.

I looked at other open source solutions but they were all far beyond my technical limitations.  Commercial solutions were beyond my budget.

Not sure if this helps you or not, but I thought you should hear from someone who is an end-user rather than a developer.