I was following the thread "Re: DotNetNuke® 3.3/4.3 Release Candidate Available for Free Download"
(http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/ForumsDotNetNuke/tabid/795/forumid/112/threadid/44520/threadpage/2/scope/posts/Default.aspx)
in the "Announce It!" forum, and wanted to chime in on this topic.  (I posted it here because it doesn't really belong in that forum.)

kennster wrote:

Each module is a separate sub project and maintained by a separate team of volunteers. To integrate the source of these modules would further (and unnecessarily) strain the developers who put a great deal of time and effort into this release. I have been waiting I can't tell you how long for this great release, and ANYTHING to expedite that process is surely worth a few extra minutes to download the source versions of the modules! As it stands, I believe this is the first major release to automatically install the 'uber' DotNetNuke modules: Forums, Gallery, Blog, Repository, and Store. It is such a trivial thing to download and install the source for these modules, I can't believe anyone would bother griping about it as it would probably take less time to download and install the source than to write the actual complaint!

This is the part I will disagree with, and I want to explain why I believe the original poster made a good point.  It is NOT a trivial thing to browse through each of the project pages and download each of them seperately.  While I have a relatively fast connection, for some reason web-browsing at www.dotnetnuke.com is slow and sometimes cumbersome.  It could be a factor of our location, the path we have to take to get to that webserver, the price of fortune cookies in Paris, doesn't matter.  The plain fact is that browsing the DNN website is slow from here.

The current structure of the project download page requires me to go to the Downloads Page, then scroll down, then click on the first project, compare version #s and release dates, then hit the back arrow, go to the second project, compare version #s, hit the back arrow, etc...  The problem here is that each page take 10-20 seconds to load and since there are twenty seperate projects I have to do this for, it sometimes takes 30-40 minutes just to find out if there are any new releases!  That is not a trivial thing, and is the reason why I don't check for new releases unless I'm sure there might be one out there.

I'm not referring to "only" source code, I'm referring to downloads in general.  Module upgrades, documentation, whatever. 

I have about 10Mbs of Internet bandwidth here, but for some reason this particular site seems to move in slow motion. While the current structure makes sense for maintaining, it is cumbersome to navigate through at slower speeds.  Once I find the download, I get some really good download speeds, but it takes awhile to find them.

I monitor a LOT of the forums here, just so I can keep up with what is going on, and hopefully get notified of new releases.  However, I have to monitor these via e-mail notification, simply because it takes an unbelievable amount of time to browse the forums.  Surprisingly, there are several projects that post releases but don't post anything about them in the forums.  Instead, they post about them in their blogs or via other means.  So, I don't hear about those either until later.

If there was someway I could go to just one page and see the current versions of all modules, that would be fantastic, and would save me a LOT of time.  I don't expect that to happen though, and otherwise I love the website, I just wanted to throw my $.02 in there in support of another person.

I was looking at that page the other day, trying to figure out if that is what it was.  It's a bugger to read, as it only shows the first few lines then you have to click on the "More..." link to read the rest of it, only to find out that it wasn't what you thought it was and then have to go back to the previous page, try to figure out where you left off, and repeat those steps over and over again.  I suppose it wouldn't be tooooo bad if it didn't take so long between page changes (timed it at 30 seconds a little bit ago each time I click a link), but forums are much-much easier to read (and they can send you an e-mail containing the post).

I'm really-really begininning to hate blogs... *sigh*