I have to chime back in on this one.

First of all Joe brought up a VERY big point that I completely missed on my inital posting and that is the issues brought on by third party modules.  This is my biggest issue overall with the upgrade process and personally there is NOTHING that DotNetNuke can do to stop this as it is not their responsibility.  Due to this nature I am very careful on which third party modules I use in my websites and I also have a full testing environment setup that I utilize for testing on an upgrade.  This is a practice that I believe EVERYONE should have for thier DNN sites as it is a smart thing from a development procedure.

There are certain third-party modules out there that I feel are MUCH worse than others in terms of upgrade support and integration into the DNN core.  Personally I never utilized CataLook as a store due to my evaulation of their horrible integration into the core DNN and all of the issues I experienced in trying to test their module.  Now I don't mean to pick on any specific module however, since it was brought up as a stumbling point I felt I needed to make the comment.

As for stable releases, I personally do not find anything majorly breaking wrong with 4.5.0 or 4.5.1, there are a few "issues" with AJAX and other functionality however I will say that my site is running the best that it ever has after the upgrade to 4.5.1.  I totally disagree with the statements and recommendations of NOT going to 4.5.1.  I will say that you should TEST FIRST, but that should be a given.  The new AJAX functionality and other items within 4.5.x helps provide a much better user experience and personally I have only experienced a few issues with third-party modules and all of those were resolved very quickly.

I don't mean to pass all of the blame off on other individuals but I want to make sure that there is a distinction between items that are under DNN's control and items that are well outside the control of DNN and the community as a whole. 

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-Mitchel Sellers
Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider, DNN MVP
CEO/Director of Development - IowaComputerGurus Inc.


Visit mitchelsellers.com for my mostly DNN Blog and support forum.

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Carlos:
I was not talking about the third party modules. I understand that the third party module makers should build their module around the DNN and not the other way around. However, I do not understand why you disagree that the DNN install should be like the MS-Word installation. Why not?
I would like to use DNN for my website and without any hassle! What is wrong with that? You say DNN is not user friendly, then why not make it user friendly. Isn't that the purpose of every software/product? That it should be user friendly!

My other big concern was about the documentation. I see that every other person on the forum asks the same questions because they have same errors. I do not know why there is no documentation for common errors. In addition, if these are common errors why aren't they fixed?

Most of you experts spend your time on the forum answering the same questions over and over. I appreciate your patience and support you give to new people. However, honestly, I would love you people to work on different new modules, brainstorm about new modules/ideas. I could use a quiz module.

I am parasite and I will not be able to contribute anything to the DNN community, other than buying stuff from the vendors. I think that is also a good contribution. Whenever I get a free module from any website/vendor, I make sure to buy something from them, if I can use it. However, honestly, there are very less module in the market, compared to Linux.

I have not upgraded my website to DNN 4.5 because I do not understand the upgrade process. Maybe I am scared to upgrade it because I do not want to ruin the website, which is already up, and running. I am experimenting with other website for last two months. I am unable to create a parent portal. My website is hosted by go daddy, which does not allow us to install DNN on the root. This is a well-known problem, yet there is no documentation about it. Every time somebody asks about parent portal and godaddy, the only advice we get is install DNN on the root manually! We have problems installing the DNN automatically with godaddy in a sub directory how are we suppose to do it manually? You people have done this thousand time so probably it is easy for you, but not for us!

Anyways, I do not want to get into fight. Please remember that I am not saying that DNN is bad and some other thing is better. I will not and I cannot say that because I really have not tried anything else. In addition, I am not saying that there is not enough support on this forum, but only lack of detailed documentation for recurring and common errors.


Peace.