Sorry to have such a surprised subject header but What the Hell is this.

I was expecting from a major release something new and something to push the DNN System into the main stream.

First the move to C# I understand as it was a pain finding good developers in VB.net that did not cost an arm and a leg to get any work done.
It will defo help the project move forward.

Second I was expecting some major changes in this version but so far it is slower.
There are several sections that could do with a new look and feel and nothing has been done.

I know you are all developers and look at everything from a development angle but this is just not good enough in the current economic climate. More thought on usability and marketing needs to be put into the core.

I do not want to have to spend shed loads of money for third party apps.
And I do spend thousands at the moment for apps but if they are not upgradeable to dnn 6 then I will not be going near 6 with a barge poll.

Unfortunately this happened when 3 went to 4 some third party apps did not work hence some people had to either move and lose loads or stay and miss out. its crazy.

Anyway Usability changes I will upload this week to see if anyone else agrees with me.
And as for marketing I could spend a month just writing sections on where DNN went wrong on the marketing.
Firstly I do not know if this has been fixed but. Spaces in menu items i.e. Hello world shows as helloworld. it should show as hello_world.
For years now I have been looking for a way to do this without messing up my install and without paying for an over rated third party system.
And before anyone says it I tried every trick out there and each had there issues.
Second the .aspx is there ever going to be a way to hide this. so my URLS can look like
mydomainname.com/hello_world/hello
rather than
mydomainname.com/helloworld/hello.aspx

There are several marketing reasons why this needs to be changed.

And as an idea on the usability. The new control panel is worse than the old one.
Marketing pieces are all over the place i.e.
Site Marketing is under site settings.
Google Analytics is under its own tab
Search engine site map is under its own tab
newsletter "       "

Maybe it would be better if all this was under a tab called marketing.
and all the design stuff was under a tab called design or appearance which ever floats your boat.
and all the security stuff be under a security tab rather than being in 5 different places.

This is all just an idea but if you want to attract more users you need to make it easier.
I can if the team would like put a project plan together to simplify the current menus and I have an idea for the control panel which would be 10 times better than the current one in DNN6 . The ribbon bar from DNN 5 was better than this new one in my opinion.

Anyway please leave me a message on here if you would like to talk about this and the other things that my clients and people who use my sites said would make this system the best in the world.

As compared to wordpress for usability and marketing DNN has a long way to go.

Thanks
Paul

Sorry again but the more I look through this and the more it makes me think.

First, The new control panel does have possibilities but it comes down to a fact of usability. Which for any DNN savy person that is not an issue but it is time for DNN to target the not so savy i.e. the person who learnt in a few easy steps how to use wordpress.

The control panel would be better if you had a tab for each of the following at the top.
instead of common tasks / current page / other tools.

You could have

quick steps / could be icon based with links to other areas such as click add module it takes you to the module tab / select pages and it takes you to the pages tab. click site wizard it takes you to the site wizard.

page modules / for adding the module to the page and selecting the module ect....
page settings / for controlling the page settings on the current page
marketing / for marketing settings.
security / for security settings

and so on............

You have the perfect opportunity to make DNN number one in the CMS race for everything including usability and marketing.

Thanks
Paul