Tony, I have never had ANY problems whatsoever in installing Beta 7, and I've installed it many times.

You logged an issue way back, and the problem appears to be with your hosting environment. Of course you never supplied any feedback when we attempted to help you. Also other people have been logging issues in gemini beta 7 which would appear to confirm that they were successful:

http://support.dotnetnuke.com/issue/ViewIssue.aspx?id=8344&PROJID=23 (DNNP-8344)

I might as well have just said I could not see the PowerDNN site because the internet connection was down, therefore you guys must be useless.

Tony I look forward to you hijacking another thread sometime soon. As a volunteer your contribution, appreciation and anticorp marketing efforts really make life worth living when we are trying utmost to get an excellent product out.

Alex, I know that you do understand our position and thankfully we have this mechanisim to express our views. I guess beta testers need to be of a quality that understands what a beta is in the firstplace, to expect production ready in beta will never be, however the beta tester is a vital role in the project tasks. To say a beta is "rubbish" helps noone during the project cycles.

Perhaps there needs to be a beta tester agreement that allows the project manager to choose his feedback teams, while still permitting silient beta testing??

For example if a Beta tester is not providing suitable test feedback then he or she should beable to remove that tester from the project. This comment is not to undermind the tester but to express the importance of the tester role where quality must be maintained, too much "rubbish" will slow the projects release.

The main concern is that the current process will will seriously affect us if all of a sudden if the only real exposure to the next release (Cambrian) comes as a "big bang" (pun intended), this will delay our ability to meet demand.

In our situation access to progressive betas means:

• We are in touch with proposed changes and how they may affect our deployments and customisations.
• They allow us to consider new design techniques that allow us to keep our custom modules in sync with new features.
• It allows us to maintain our knowledge and skill sets in time for production release.
• it allows us to give constructive feedback to DotNetNuke and to eventually serve the community better.

what is does not do is:

• The betas are not for production deployments
• It does not deliver final design and will be subject to changes.

What I am saying is that Beta Testers are a vital part of the project, both developer\analysts as testers and usability testing. A good tester can make the project, equally a poor tester who does not report suffient information can break the project.

I don't know all the answers, however the current process for us does raise suffient concern to be serious.

Cheers

Craig

 A couple items:

1.  The release schedule was updated a couple weeks ago and accurately reflects where we are and when we expect to release DNN 5.0 which is NOT DotNetNuke Cambrian.  Cambrian is not a single release but a series of releases of which DNN 5.0 is but the first in the series.

2.  We fully understand the value of Beta testing teams which is why we have continued to expand the availability of the betas as we have progressed.  Early betas were definitely not stable enough to be of value and were only useful so that core team members could easily refer to a specific build when testing, however, both Beta 5 and Beta 6 were rolled out to a fairly large audience and I expect that RC1 will include an even larger distribution.

3. Our past decisions regarding Beta's and RCs has been to release them to companies and individuals who had built businesses around DotNetNuke.  The biggest indicator that a company was serious was whether they were providing material support to the project.  We cannot possibly identify everyone and needed some objective measure to determine who falls into this category.  Everyone may not agree with this decision, but ultimately we felt it was better than arbitrarily choosing a group of testers.

4. We expect to post the first RC in the next day or two and will likely further expand the group of individuals with access to the code.  I'll make an official announcement when we post the code.