From a high level:

- the Telerik RAD Controls for ASP.NET AJAX must remain tightly coupled with the DotNetNuke Community Edition application ( ie. the controls can not be removed from the distribution and used in other ASP.NET applications ). In fact, the Telerik DLL includes technical restrictions to ensure it is only used within DNN.

- DotNetNuke Community Edition "end users" have no restrictions in regards to interacting with the core framework or modules which utilize Telerik

- DotNetNuke Community Edition "developers" can not utilize the Telerik web controls directly as part of their software development efforts ( ie. module developmeent, skin design, etc... ). They can only utilize the controls through abstract wrappers which are provided as part of the DNN platform. In DNN 5.2, the only wrapper which has been provided is a Telerik Menu skin object. We expect to add many more wrappers in future releases.

Thanks Shaun for the reply.

I'm still curious about the RAD editor issue. Hopefully your blog post will address this.  Will it be PE only or available to CE users as well?

Telerik's RAD editor is MUCH better than the FCK editor.  I have never understood Telerik's refusal to make the RAD editor available to the masses - especially since they have already done the work to build the DNN provider and package it as a DNN module.  I can't see DNN developers using it stand-alone in a DNN module since that would mean a DNN install would end up with two different RTE's and would be very confusing for end users.  DNN developers are just going to call the default DNN RTE in their modules.  This means the RAD editor is of no use to DNN developers unless it can be made the default RTE.

Many of Telerik's other controls are also very nice and could/would/are used by DNN developers.  I especially like RAD Grid. 

In order to use the Telerik RAD Editor in DNN, you need a DNN Rich Text Editor Provider which wraps the basic editor control. So although the Telerik RAD Editor is included in the DLL which is now shipped with all editions of the DotNetNuke platform,  in DNN 5.2 the Telerik Rich Text Editor Provider is only being shipped with DotNetNuke Professional Edition ( it will be the default rich text editor for new installs ). I would agree with your point that the RAD Editor is an extremely powerful rich text editor and we spent considerable effort overhauling the previous provider which Telerik used to provide, so that it is well integrated with DNN 5.x in terms of observing the permissions model, etc... It is possible that we may backport this provider to DotNetNuke Community Edition in the future.