DNN stores all data in a SQL database, which forces us to serialize development. I mean, people have to wait for other's to finish applying their changes before they can apply their own onto the database.

DNN allows you to export an entire portal into a template xml and then create a new portal out of that. Xmls can be treated as source files and can be merged. So we decided to use that to parallelize our development a bit.

But we're finding that it fails randomly. Mostly it times out. The imported portal is fine whenever import succeeds. But it takes a few tries before it's successfully imported.

Add to that, we found that DNN export code simply ignores all exceptions, which did not seem right and it also caused a few issues.

Is it because it was just a templating mechanism and it wansn't meant to import/export entire portal? Has anyone else been facing similar issues?