Why in the world do you not provide upgrade instructions with your latest revisions. Just take a peak out on the web and you'll find that there are too many people having trouble with this from version to version. I thought that I had finally gotten upgrades down to a science with Mitchel Sellers great articles on backing up and upgrading your DNN site. Matter of fact, I've had three very successful no nonsense upgrades over the past 18 months. Today I attempt to follow Mitchel's awesome instructons again to upgrade my DNN 5.5.1 to 5.6.3. No luck, dang-it. I backed up my database, took a snapshot of my virtual directory contents, then unzipped the upgrade package over my site. Next I crossed my fingers and browsed to
http://www.mysite.com/install/install.... Nothing happens, my browser goes blank the status bar flashes green for a second, then it says Done. Not what I expected to see, so I gave it a minute thinking stuff was going on on the server. After a few minutes I tried to browse to my site. I got the login page I expected, so I logged in. I went to the Host Settings page to check the version, and it still says 5.5.1. What gives??? So I tried
http://www.mysite.com/install/install... again and saw the same behavior. Eventually I got myself so wrapped around the axel that I couldn't login to my site anymore. So I reverted everything and eventually got my self back to 5.5.1. Now I am at a loss.
Eventually I ran across Chris Hammon's wiki article at
http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/W..., which gives instructions to create a new website database, blah, blah. Are you kidding me!!! I run this my site for a boy scout troop. I picked DNN because it gives me a no-nonesense content management system that requires very little support and maintenance. The ISP plan we purchased only allows for one SQL Server database and one root web. Again, I'm at a loss.
I know your going to say...but it's free...well so what. I can't believe your Professional version diverges from the free version that greatly in the way of installation and upgrades. What are your coporate customers telling you? DNN is playing in the big leagues now with it's Professional offering. I can't believe coporate America is going to stand for this. Upgrades should be fast and no non-sense, especially when there are companies out there that I'm sure have dozens, if not 100's of portals. Would it be so difficult to maintain an UpgradingDNN.pdf file somewhere on your support site? I emplore you to consider it. Just take a look on the web at the number of people having trouble with this, and you'll see how many potential DNN Professional customers you your missing out on.
Sorry for the soap box, but as a software professional myself I think I'd be fired if I had a publicly available product that required so much effort to upgrade.