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HomeHomeOur CommunityOur CommunityGeneral Discuss...General Discuss...Is the DNN community unhappy?Is the DNN community unhappy?
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8/22/2014 12:47 PM
 

I think it is oversimplifying things quite a bit to say that people should be happy because they are getting a great product for free.  There are lots of great products which are free.  Part of the angst you hear about in the community is because members in an Open Source community want to be involved, to feel connected and empowered.  

I have been to many websites and used many products.  I will often run into a bug or have an idea for a feature that would make the product better.  But I often get frustrated because I don't have a mechanism that allows me to solve my problem.  Often I can write a bug report or send an email, but rarely is my issue actually addressed, and certainly not in a reasonable time frame. 

One of the reasons that large communities build up around Open Source is because people want to be able to help; to contribute to making the product better. Maybe it is by writing documentation, or fixing bugs or submitting code for a new feature. Helping actually gives these people a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction and is in itself a form of reward. When you prevent people from helping who have the skill, time and passion, then they can get frustrated, and sometimes, if they get frustrated enough, they leave the community altogether.

So, my question is why shouldn't DNN Corp. accept the offers of help? I know that you cannot rely 100% on getting volunteers to do everything.  But there is a lot that volunteers can and will do, and if it is good for the product, why would I not want their help?  Does it require more management and coordination effort? Sure, but I think the trade-off is worth it.  And so do thousands of other Open Source projects.

If it weren't for volunteers and the Open Source community, DNN would not be as widely used and as successful as it is today.


Joe Brinkman
DNN Corp.
 
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8/22/2014 12:59 PM
 
There's no lack of opportunities for volunteers. Volunteers say they want to volunteer. Great. Work on organizing and cleaning up the wiki. It's a hodgepodge of information. Different articles in different fonts and styles. The API documentation has a lot of methods and classes with zero description. Go in the source code and add descriptions to the items you know what they do. Why does WordPress feel like a more coherent community. Because they walk the talk and they are really huge fans of the system. The number of DNN active volunteers to the number of users or downloads is minuscule.

As for finding information on the site, I filter by site url in Google. For example: "how to display error message in a dnn module site:dnnsoftware.com". Google will display info from the wiki, forums and every area from the site in one place.
 
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8/27/2014 9:16 AM
 
I'm an application software engineer of some 25+ years and deal mainly with JAVA and C#. Documentation of any system is always difficult to fully realize. Good documentation by developers is rare. User documentation should be done by a seasoned business analyst with lots of experience with the system. System or low-level (API) documentation should be done by a developer with a good sense of use cases to back up the documentation.

Open Source documentation suffers from the same as any corporate entity does because documentation is the last consideration during development. Even highly evolved open source systems suffer this way. At my current gig I was tasked with cranking out Spring-based JAVA RESTful services. I ran into a snag and went BINGing and Googling for information and found disjointed documentation and no way to solve my solution. Turns out the problem I ran into was a bug in the framework and to "fix" it was to upgrade to the latest Spring version. :)

So IMO DNN's documentation is no better or no worse than many other open source systems.
 
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8/27/2014 12:43 PM
 

The DNN API documentation is based on XML comments (three ///)  in the source code. All one has to do is write a 1+ line description in pure text. No styling is needed. No documentation software is needed. No extra software is needed. No laborious work is needed. It's as simple as it can be. When a DNN developer is looking at an API method with no comments, take 10 seconds and write a quick description in the comment. Over time and with multiple developers, the API gets much better documented and with little effort spread over time. I know documenting is boring but if it's broken in little digestible pieces, you can't feel the work.

Another point, there's a commercial entity behind DNN developing the platform, with revenue and full time paid developers. I think they can afford to hire a technical writer even on a part time contract basis. I mean hire a remote worker in a low cost labor country like India, China, Philippines or a country in south America. I guess because this is a cost and not a direct revenue generating activity, a company bulks at making this happen. I personally believe it's a myopic view. The long term benefit is happier module & skin  developers, better modules, lower costs modules, more professional modules, lower cost of entry and the eventual of a healthier ecosystem. 

DNN is not an open source project dependent on volunteer work only to give an excuse of poor documentation. Also some open source projects have excellent documentation. jQuery and jQuery UI is one. WordPress has very good documentation. Here's their API documentation with examples: http://codex.wordpress.org/Word.... There are hundreds of other examples.

 

 
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8/28/2014 6:01 AM
 
Tony,
you are right and with DNN on github, ANY developer or community member is able to add comments to the source code and submit a pull request.
DNN Corp. is now focusing on their commercial products, these teams might still contribute to the platform when needed or useful, but besides, the remaining employees will be busy managing the community and coordinating contributions, but there will little time for them to develop new features.

Cheers from Germany,
Sebastian Leupold

dnnWerk - The DotNetNuke Experts   German Spoken DotNetNuke User Group

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