Whatever path you choose, make sure you are not doing it for money otherwise you will fail.  If you offer a service you are not passionate about executing you will fail the task and your customer, destroying your name and bring nothing but dread for yourself.   If you love building modules, then build modules.  If you love working with people all over the world and help them create stellar DNN sites then start a DNN consulting service.  There is big money in both but only if you are passionate about what you do.

Personally, I love building modules and apps (mobile, Mac & Windows) for DNN as well as working with people from all over the world providing them with custom DNN solutions.  Its exciting for me to be on conference calls with my customer in England and their customer in Australia helping them design a data mining solution that pulls from servers in over 20 countries to generate a dashboard rendered in DNN.  I do it for a living so I am interested in the money, but I do it more for those times when people express how exceptional the product or service is that I gave them.   When a customer calls you and thanks you for building a module that saves them $50k each year or has cut down their reporting implementations by 90% that is a very powerful moment that money can't buy.  You can't get that if you go into this just for the money.

What you offer should be your craft, should be carried out with extreme care and precision to the best of your abilities.  You should enjoy
manifesting works of art in DNN because it requires vast amounts of time that you will dread if you do this just for the money.

To become friends with people in France, Iraq, Japan, Netherlands, Chile and countless more through building custom solutions for them with DNN is rewarding on its own and you can get that by building modules, skins or offering custom services.  So the path you choose will always be the best choice as long as you choose that path you are passionate about. 

Another benefit of being part of the DNN community or a provider for DNN is the technical growth you will gain working with talented developers and sharing resources.  I've come a long way since 2003 when Shaun first launched DotNetNuke and that is only due to all of the great developers in this community sharing their resources, ideas and skills.   I've helped many people get started selling DNN modules and skins just as many others have helped me when I needed it most.  That is what makes the DNN community so powerful and that is why its so sad to see it diminish.

I'm not saying DNN is dying or even at risk of it, its far from it.  I'm just saying the community seems a bit lost right now due to Evoq and we just need to find a new home where we can flourish.

In summary, if you are passionate about DNN then yes you should jump in and build an extension or offer custom services.  If you need help getting started please contact me and I'll do whatever I can to get you going and we can work together to bring exceptional extensions and services to the DNN community.

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Professional DNN Extensions, custom solutions and mobile apps since 2003.
www.OnyakTech.com

Heyhey. So this is where the forums are. Cool. I found them again.

Seriously I don't come here very often any more. It's usually when someone taps me and tells me "take a look at this thread". I wish I had the time to solve all your problems, but only 24 hours per day and quite a lot of posts with sometimes really difficult issues. Besides: Sebastian always beats me to it anyway.

I've spent a few hours wading through these 11 pages of posts. Wow. So much passion. And not always positive, unfortunately. I count about 10 issues that are brought forward and all issues that you'd hear in the corridors if you'd been at any DNN event over the past 5 years. "The Corp should do this, the Corp should do that". "DNN Sucks" (that actually almost became a theme at the 2013 European DNN event after someone put it on a slide).

I'm a vendor and I have not been bought by DNN Corp, nor have I quit. So from the above I am a rare breed. I'm also a DNN MVP (I wrote the new DNN Blog module, for instance), because I think that a healthy open source project needs developers to step up to the plate. And this year I'll be continuing this approach. We can rant all we want and badger DNN Corp for lack of "support". But it's *our* community, not theirs. We are the community! So stop wining and start programming. Here are some ideas:
- Help the Active Forums team turn that module into the best of breed. It can't be that hard.
- If you feel one of the modules that has disappeared from the market was too valuable to lose: write one yourself. No one is stopping you. In fact, if you're right you'll be applauded. Sacha Trauwen wrote the OpenUrlRewriter after the purchase of iFinity.

As Sebastian hinted earlier, with a bunch of guys on this side of the Atlantic we're looking at how to provide continuity for the platform. That serves not just my own interest (I would love to keep selling my module) but it also servers everyone else's needs. We need to wake up and realize we don't need anyone's permission or help. We can do this ourselves. DNN started out as a small community as well. It's dying? Only if we let it. My gut feeling tells me that if we have top notch open source modules then the market will be there. After all: the customer doesn't much care which platform you use. They're only interested in how easy it is to maintain. And we can make that better ourselves.

To be continued ....

Peter

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Peter Donker

http://www.bring2mind.net Home of the Document Exchange, the professional document management solution for DNN

that's not quite correct, the corp is not sponsoring the forums module  - what I posted on the other thread is:

"Both ActiveForums and the old core Forums module are open-source projects, and not something that the Corp controls. There is sometimes confusion with this as the main (really only) core forums developer was Chris Paterra (building off Tam Minh's earlier work) and he is a DNN Corp employee - however Chris worked on the forums in his spare time and he is no longer interested in developing it. ActiveForums has already been forked (project is somewhere on github) and I would expect the old "core" forum to end up similarly getting new life in a fork.

FYI dnnsoftware.com runs the core forum with a few bugfixes we made (that we will contribute to anyone who takes on the forums project)"

Regarding AF, our original intention was to make it an opensource project and then contribute to it and move these forums to it - however some analysis showed this would be substantial work and we simply didn't have the resources to do so in a timely fashion (so made the source available so people could fork). As such we simply fixed a few issues on these forums that we see in the eventlog. If we need additional forums functionality, we'll have to decide if we contribute it to the forums project or contribute to the active forums fork. BTW the active forums fork is https://github.com/jbrunken/ActiveForums - I'm sure Jason would welcome contributions.

 

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