We do a fair amount business with clients who just want to be able to edit the text on their website... Small SME's and start-ups that need a simple CMS solution. Easy-peasy, we say, DNN is it... Or is it..?
You know what would be great - a DNN Lite... A small, lean installation with the bare minimum, as follows:
- Ability to log into a simple DNN CMS website
- Regular DNN skinning engine (.ascx skins and containers as normal)
- but without the injection of bumpf tags and classes like <span class="head"> for titles, etc - I have commented on this before...
- also without the search, links, logo, etc, etc skin objects... We don't need those do we really - for something like this..?
- Simple Site Settings panel - to insert keywords, aliases, etc
- Only core module is the Text/HTML editor (and obviously the login)
- 3 basic roles - Host, Admin and Content Editor
That's it... Kinda vague, I know. But what DNN needs, I think, is a simpler CMS solution to fill a big market gap. Other solutions are getting their base installations down to like 6 or 7mb. DNN is currently anywhere between 16 and 22mb - depending on your version... It's total overkill for some of the little-guy clients we often do work for...
Also, because DNN is fairly heavy and bloated with redundant stuff for backwards support, it's a lot slower than its competitors - at a base level install anyway... A DNN Lite might attract more users to the framework. It'll also give us a better optimized, seo-friendly base to start from - one that doesn't require untangling.
Anyone else's thoughts...