I’ve used DNN for several years now and find it to be the most useful “portal management” software on the market. I know everyone puts in a lot of hard work to get it to the point it is. As good as it is, there are several major problems with the project. I know I’m probably going to get flamed for criticising DNN, but I think somebody has to do it.
Every time I’ve seen a thread like this there are the usual die-hards jumping in with comments about how its “free” and done by volunteers, etc... I do not want to go down that road and argue semantics. Please start a new thread if you want to discuss these kinds of issues. J I’m taking the time to put this down so that something will be done about the problems and I hope that others will chime in support of these issues. Anyhow the major issues:
1. DNN’s site, and Gemini are often down or slow. It seems like every time I go to the site lately it is either not working or really slow. It’s pretty hard to report bugs when Gemini is down. Other “open source” projects don’t all have this problem, so why DNN?
2. Bugs are ignored for long periods of time. I’ve reported bugs including the actual fixes in the source code only to have them sit there (sometimes for over a year) without any acknowledgment. Sometimes they are flagged as duplicate because someone else has reported the same issue months down the road. So why is the earlier issue flagged as duplicate? Why are core bugs not even acknowledged?
3. Major bugs are not caught because there is no public beta. By listening to some of the team members it seems that DNN has a stringent release protocol. However MAJOR bugs are not being caught before release. I think part of the problem is that that you only get to beta test if you are a paid member. 4.1.1 had major issues with compression that would have been caught by anyone using third party controls or even the repository module. Why weren’t these issues caught? Perhaps they were caught but couldn’t be fixed by the time of the release. If so, they should have been put in a readme...
4. Forums are next to useless to search. I was really concerned when the decision to switch from asp.net forums to the forums module was made. I wondered about the loss of the old knowledgebase and how functional the new forums would be. I can see I was right. Search is downright horrible. Unless you notice that the start date is set for today and change it, you will get no results. If you expand the date range, most often it will time out and you’ll get nothing. And don’t try to narrow it down by checking off a particular sub-forum because that doesn’t even work.
5. Stale projects. This is probably the biggest issue. I realise that there was quite a shake up recently with certain people being asked to resign to try to correct this, but I’m not sure even now that things have been corrected. For example, the Active Directory core module has had several major bugs for well over a year that have not be corrected or even acknowledged. In fact if you look at the forums, some members have actually taken it upon themselves to correct the issues every time a new release is made and offer third party patches. There doesn’t seem to by any response from TAM in ages, so I don’t think it will be fixed soon. Just about everyone who uses DNN for an intranet portal in a windows environment needs this feature, but it is ignored. Other projects like the repository have promised releases for over a year...but nothing ever shows up. And the gallery has been in beta forever...
6. No Changelog. This seems to be changing somewhat, with some postings in the blogs etc, but still there is no changelog file in the distribution. This is an absolute necessity. As mentioned above it seems like there are major bugs in every release so it’s a real crap-shoot trying to decide if you should upgrade or not to fix bugs you currently have.
7. Roadmap is blank. The roadmap is useless and should be removed from the site. It hasn’t had accurate information in it since 3.0 first came out. Mostly it’s blank anyway...
I’m sure there is a lot more I could on about, but I think that’s plenty. I realise that managing a project of this size and complexity is difficult, but other open source projects (some as large) don’t seem to have these kinds of issues. I hope something is being done to address some of these issues as they’ve plagued DNN for the last couple of years. DNN is an absolute Godsend and hope some of this is worked out soon.