Okay, I have to say something.

I am not going to apologize for criticizing the Core Team or the other module teams. The practice of making you feel like you can’t say anything because there are volunteers working on portions of the project does not preclude active community members to express their opinions. In fact, this practice should stop. I am an evangelist for DNN, right now I have a possible project with the federal government where DNN is applicable, forums functionality may be part of it, but do you think I would dare use this site as a demo??? I have said this before, DNN is now a corporation because they want to be taken seriously and augment their credibility, you cannot say that in trade shows and then when things don’t go right say that quirks and problems are to be expected and that you don’t know when they will be fixed because the developers are volunteers. This is very contradictory and undermines the credibility of the whole operation. And by the way, where is the group of folks that are supposed to take care of customers who pay for support??? Can’t they work on all these little “quirks”.  See this link and tell me if you think that we should not expect more quality from DNN and take them seriously, instead of just a hobby project.

Sincerely,
Carlos

***note : i'm not a dnn corp member, these views are my own***

All,

I appreciate what you're saying - trust me we discuss all these things in core chats, in often much more harsh terms. I also don't like to hide behind the "this is a volunteer project" excuse -i hope we can exceed the standards of proprietary software and we often need the community to remind/prompt/shout at us to make us aware of what's important/missing etc. However, I thought i'd fire out a couple of points, feel free to discuss.

• dnn corp - this is a seperate entity that provides paid support. Often the work done on this support ends up being contributed back to the core (bug fixes/enhancements etc.) - They also underwrite a certain portion of the day to day development, paying for fixes and enhancements. Trust me, these people are not getting paid very much (you'd probably be shocked if you knew)
• forum fixes - this is really a project issue. When the projects were split out there were very large benefits - overnight we had many more volunteers as each project runs as an independant entity with it's own teams. As with all teams when this works, it's very succesful, but sometimes teams don't gel, volunteers doing do work they commit to, etc., so we (core team/trustees) keep an eye on projects and nudge them along or replace teams where necessary. Sometimes what users want or what the corp want don't meet what the project teams plan.This is a fact of life. In addition just as in software development a large portion of projects go over time/budget. Whilst we could hack a solution in for the forums on dotnetnuke.com (and are considering it as a one-off), typically we want everyone to be able to run with the same code we're running with. In this case the forums team choose to work on a large number of bug fixes, and are close to a release (they've betatested and hope to be not too long away from a release. ). I'm sure they could have created a release that only fixed the firefox 3 issue, but the time to package the release and get it through the tracker would probably have added days to the larger planned bug release. They weighed up the various factors and choose the option they felt fitted best.
• it is a volunteer project - so volunteer. Don't like the videos because they're dnn 3? Record a new one and contact a core team member, we'll make sure it get's hosted - that's how those original videos exist in the first place. We're making efforts to make this easier - in fact we're making a lot of efforts around documentation and getting the community involved, however we're treating this much like code enhancements -we try it out in private first, hammer out the bugs and add a little polish and then go public. There are half a dozen core team members/project leads working on document inititives at the moment
• project pages - a corp team member is currently creating a series of tools so project teams can better manage their areas i.e. manage their team members rights etc, manage downloads etc., I hope the project leads will take advantage of them as they roll out
• the forge is a way for other community members to associate their projects with dotnetnuke, it makes it easy for users to link back into dotnetnuke.com - frankly speaking we don't have the hardware, bandwidth or infrastruture to support this, and rather than have lots of people with lots of projects on personal sites, it's better to have some sort of resource that we can leverage. It also exposes us to more users as people find projects on codeplex  and come back here. It's certainly not perfect, but personally I think it's better than what we had before.
• accountability & response - please be aware that not everyone reads every post on these forums (theres 6000+ a month)- I suspect that most if not all of the corp will not have seen this post. Also don't forget, posts take time and in some cases people simply don't have the time to spare i.e. we're working on a 4.9 and a 5.0 release - they have priority over pretty much everything else . I only took the time to post this as I'm having a bit of writers block writing up a presentation and thought it would be good to take the time and give some feedback - on another night, i might not have even made the forums.
• things dont' happen overnight - we know where we need to be and are constantly (albeit at times infuriatingly slowly) moving towards it

Thanks,

Cathal

With all due respect, I think documentation is vital, and well worth a number of team members focussing on it. Perhaps I didn't explain my point well. We're not actually doing too much writing of documentation, it's trialling and testing an infrastructure to allow everyone to contribute e.g. I asked for a private install of the dnn wiki on dotnetnuke.com and for project leads/team members to use it to post content to see if it was suitable for our needs. Now that we've finished trialling it, I have to post my findings so we can decide what to do next i.e. in this case I feel that whilst the dnn wiki is good it lacks mature support for wikiwords, wikicategories and delete/rollback functionality. We could wait until it has those, but I feel that we're missing an opportunity in involving the community and getting them to help document, so I'm pushing to trial other (non-dnn) wiki's. Ideally we'll get this turned around quickly and then be able to make this public and hopefully then people will start to contribute content.

In addition other team members are working on an update to a module that will better support hosting articles, tutorials (both as content and links to external sites) etc.

Perhaps I'm being too optimistic (or naive :) ), but I've always strongly believed that if we put the correct infrastructure in place to take content from the community, people will step up and create unique and interesting content, hugely increasing the amount of contributers, and allowing developers more time to work on enhancing the core and project modules. We hope to give you all the chance to prove me right ...