Thanks for the replies.

Friendly URLS are very important to me.  It is very important to google.  I can provide evidence but won't put everyone to sleep with the details as I'm sure they all agree.  Do some searches and start scanning pages...spend an hour and you will see how truly important they are.  Without, you might as well pack up and go home unless you are the only game in town.

I think the thing that concerns me is, DNN seems to want to charge for their modules - while a open content cms like Drupal has thousands without fee.  I'm afraid to get neck deep and find out that a critical aspect of a project is missing and will cost me. 

Are there any attempts to foster and further the open source end of things?  As most of my work with DNN will originally be for non commercial purposes, maybe there is enough in the main package to suffice? 

I guess the only way to know is to play around with it eh? 

Thanks for the info guys!

DNN is a great product & is getting better evey day & I would highly recommend it to anyone.

Active Modules produce great products such as active forums but be aware that if you buy it, you only get updates & support for a limited amout of time (a year I think of the top of my head). This can work out quite expensive if you keep your DNN site up to date (& for security reasons you should) as you will need to subscribe to future support & updates to make it work with future DNN versions. Unfortunitly this is the case for most 3rd party modules. If you have a few modules that use the yearly subscription method it can cost you a lot of money just to keep your website running securely.

The other thing to watch out for wth DNN, is that most 3rd party modules do NOT come with the source code or if they do it is normally at a premium price.

If you do use DNN I would highly suggest that you check out http://www.ventrian.com/  - great modules (news, gallery, property & subcriptions modules etc..) & you get great modules, great support, module source code & pay only about $50US a year for access to all his modules & source code!

The other thing I would recommend that you look at is http://www.openwebstudio.com/ - this is a framework that allows you to build your own ajax based modules.

Hope this helps you work out in what direction you want to go!

That is an interesting distinction ..... dotnetnuke is not a CMS ... I always say it is .... but you are probably right ..... which modules does make dotnetnuke a CMS? name me a few of the more popular ones?

/Johan Hyra vattenskoter