Joe Brinkman mentioned my site www.uncommongames.com in a thread regarding ASPDNSF ML/DNN that is now locked. He referenced my site as one (amongst others) that shows what is possible on this platform. I just wanted to provide an update on my site's status with what will hopefully be received as some positive news.
I don't want this topic to be used to create any more flaming, so feel free to lock this if needed. Obviously I don't have to tell you that.
I will start from the present and work backwards. This past weekend I attended the StomperNet Live 7 event in Atlanta. Many of you may already know that StomperNet is the premier training organization for SEO and all things eCommerce. I had a recorded site review with a live audience. My reviewer was David Bullock who is a notoriously straight shooter. Well... he said he loved my site. I hugged him and almost cried. He is a consultant and does not sell physical products. But he said that my site made him want to start selling products. I am not bragging. But just wanted to set the stage for why I would have worked so long and hard with ML/DNN to bring my site to fruition.
Here is a small amount of history.
My site has really just come together in the last week. I have been working on it tirelessly because I didn't really have the option to abandon my chosen platform (ML/DNN). ASPDNSF has been working with me for many months now. I had many of the same issues with Support saying that it was my site's customization that caused these issues. Well after all these months, Support has finally provided me two patch DLLs that solved my problems. This was only after they downloaded my entire site by FTP, set it up on a test box and ran through some troublshooting.
Here are two of the biggest issues that were resolved recently after a lot of hard work between myself, my 3rd party module providers (mainly Bruce Chapman - URL Master) and ASPDNSF Support.
1. There was a problem with Google Checkout that was due to an untested scenario where I was using Fixed Price shipping. Any of you who have used or seen ML/DNN know that there are practically unlimited configurations. I would hope that they have the ability to test through these configurations, but I still feel that we are in the maturation phase of this product and I accept the role I have to help make it better for those who come later. Maybe I shouldn't accept this role for a fairly high end cart software, but I am a pretty forgiving person with a never say die attitude. This is not to say that people who make a decision to drop a product that doesn't meet their expectations are wrong. I am just sharing my perspective. It might not be the smartest financial decision to spend so much time on an implementation like this... but that is spent cost now.
2. The second issue was due to ML/DNN incorrectly instantiating some portal settings. That is about all I know technically. Here was the method for anyone who might see this error in the future. It was very intermittent, but when it happened my site would have a hard error until I killed the w3wp.exe. I can say first hand that it is a really bad feeling to look at hundreds of errors in my Event Viewer and know that each one represents a PayPerClick visitor that got an ugly error on my site. I was pretty hard on Support before they solved this issue.
Method: AspDotNetStorefrontDNNComponents.AspdnsfPortalSettings..cctor
OK. Here is my biggest issue with ML/DNN that really cost me a lot of money from lost sales during the holiday season and thereafter. My registration page would not save data and it caused a lot of cart abandonment. I use ClickTale to record sessions on my site and so I could visually see what was happening. But Support could not replicate the issue. We finally determined that it was a URL rewrite issue. Support is quick to say that they don't support sites with 3rd party URL rewriting. But this was a cop out to me. Finally after much investigation... Support determined that they were doing a string comparison to ensure that the ML/DNN Registration modules were on the DNN registration page. That string included /Register in the URL and the R had to be capital for it to work. Unless someone can give me a good reason, I really feel like that was a big snafu on ASPDNSF's part.
I have to say that using the Force URLs to Lowercase in URL Master is what brought this BUG to light. But it is not a URL Master problem. It was a poor code implementation in ML/DNN. To deal with this issue, I had to turn off the Lowercase URLs until a new ML/DNN release. Since then, I have found that PayPal Express uses case sensitive tokens in its URLs, which can also cause issues with Lowercase URLs. Bruce Chapman (URL Master) is aware of these issues and trying to work on a strategy that will be more forgiving on issues like this.
Although I use a lot of 3rd party modules on my site, I don't even own the source code for ML/DNN, so my site has no custom code (other than the recent patches provided by Support). I use Live Content in several ways on my site.
I hope others find this post helpful and that it can maybe lay some groundwork to restoring the relationship between ASPDNSF and the DNN Community. I am definitely not taking sides and can say that I wanted to abandon ML/DNN many times. I have Support tickets spanning many months that are literally many feet long when printed. But Alfred, Melanie, Joe, Dan, George and others have persisted with me.
I don't like their approach of threatening to do chargebacks for support hours. ASPDNSF might want to reconsider that approach and work with some module developers to test out integration. Otherwise people like me who lose a lot of money due to what turns out to be ML/DNN issues might want to get their money back. Not likely I am sure.
That is about all I can say for now.
Cliff