Couple of quick responses (again - all my personal opinion, and quick as this is my lunch break, sorry to put them all in one post but I don't have time to respond to each prior post). I'm enjoying many peoples points, especially from passionate longtime users - I had an old boss who said to love your complaining customers, they're how you get better - the customer who love you wont tell you the hard truths and you don't know what the silent ones are up to.
1. As has been pointed out the dnnsoftware.com site is evolving, so expect changes - however we have to prioritise and at the minute doing something such as getting the forge back online has a higher priority than adding links - I've had equally as many complaints that the forge is not there as that the forums are hard to find - the difference is that forums are there, but forge is not, so adding additional links is a lower priority at the minute (though there is a lot of updates coming and as I'm not on that team I don't know what many of them are so I could be wrong on this)
2. Whilst forums are harder to find, the community exchange has a prominent link and it is seeing a lot more traffic, which is many ways is an improvement e.g. it searches for related questions as you type a question so leads to a lot less duplicate posts for "known" issues, and the scoring system allows people to identify as experts.
3. As for leading experts being employed by DNN Corp, this is a standard practice for any OSS project with a commercial end - these people have long been acknowledged as experts, and generally speaking do much of their work in their free time. As such they're likely to be dedicated, hardworking and hit the ground running - and there is nothing stopping them from continuing their free contributions (in fact some of it such as community exchange is done on paid time). It's also naïve (and scaremongering) to suggest that DNN Corp are plucking all these people out of the community, in many cases they've approached looking for work or applied for one of the public vacancies we advertise from time to time on the site/linkedin etc. Note: I appreciate as a community member that was employed, my opinions may be skewed, but I like to think of my community time as having been a very long job interview, and the job as reward, and I think that rewarding those who gave their time and effort for free is a good policy (that said, beyond the founders there are only a few ex coreteam/mvp's working for DNN Corp - and most of us are on the Platform team so we do what we did before, except that instead of a few hours at nights and weekends we do 40+ hours a week now)
4. In answer to the question of the ecosystem growth, I can only point to the recently reformed "Plaform" team - it contains such alumni as Charles, Shaun, Joe Brinkman, Erik van Ballegoij as well as others (and me) as a display of how important the Platform is seen (i.e. all the longest, most experienced, most community aware people in the company) - I can already see a ramp up in bugfixing, expect to see an increase in enhancements and I know there are interesting plans for broader community initiatives.
5. domain name - i believe that dnn.com was not economically viable, so this was a good compromise as we wanted to retain the commonly used "dnn" moniker so as to not cause problems with 3rd party extensions/companies etc. (Shaun covers this at length at http://www.dnnsoftware.com/community-... )
Finally, we say it over and over again, and indeed I've already said it in this post (so I'll cut-and-paste what I said in an earlier response), but the DNN Platform (i.e. what was called CE/community edition) is the platform on which everything commercial flows - without a strong, solid, ever improving free offering the commercial offering would not be anywhere near as successful. Everyone in the company from Navin on down feels this strongly, and it's backed up by the customer interviews and sales figures. Anyway, lunchtime is over, so heres my earlier response:
As a company we're all very well aware that the DNN Platform (or what was called CE) is our major selling point - the majority of our customers experience DNN via it first, and many sales come from people who have used it and grown to such an extent that they want to give us money to provide support/indemnity etc. -to many of these people the Evoq products are a nice, added bonus -if the DNN Platform wasn't maintained and enhanced we would entirely lose that channel and over time the size of the company would reduce (probably drastically)