VS Live! 2004

Open Source Portal Application Unveiled at VS Live! 2004

DotNetNuke 2.0 Immediately Available for Free Download

SAN FRANCISCO, California (March 23, 2004) DotNetNuke ( http://www.dotnetnuke.com ) today strengthened its leadership position in the Microsoft open source portal market with the general release of a completely overhauled version of its popular ASP.NET content management system. Based on cutting edge Microsoft technologies, DotNetNuke 2.0 now offers a mature portal framework that helps increase everyday organizational efficiency, with added capabilities including a two-tiered presentation model ( skinning ), multiple database support, and run-time extensibility.

Thousands of organizations worldwide already deliver their intranet and extranet solutions using the DotNetNuke portal framework. For companies seeking to ensure the success and adoption of their portal initiatives, DotNetNuke provides unparalleled extensibility in terms of custom plug-ins. This allows organizations to freely leverage the base portal functionality and shift their focus to the implementation of their specific business requirements. With a simple upgrade path from the previous generation of DotNetNuke, the benefits of the newest version are readily available to both existing and new clients.

Lord Corporation, with headquarters in Cary, NC and sales in excess of $440-MM, is a privately held company that formulates, produces and sells general purpose and specialty adhesives and polyurethane coatings; designs, manufactures and markets devices and systems to manage mechanical motion and control noise and vibration; and develops products and systems utilizing magnetically responsive technologies.

Lord Corporation wanted to create a single portal to unify its twelve disparate static HTML sites, and streamline their operation. Using the DotNetNuke portal framework, the task was accomplished by three developers working part time in a little over a two-month span of time. The finished product has well over 1500 pages and a variety of customized
plug-ins.

DotNetNuke is quickly becoming the open source industry standard for scalable portal deployments on the Microsoft platform. The exponential growth ( currently 45,000 registered users ) is a testament to the fact that the application satisfies the broadest set of customer requirements and has the most innovative and committed management team. For the past fifteen months DotNetNuke's capabilities have been driven by community feedback and market demand. Any organization considering a new portal deployment, or upgrading an existing portal deployment, is strongly encouraged to evaluate the off-the-shelf capabilities of the free DotNetNuke open source portal framework.

Microsoft Benefits Overview

• provides an "off-the-shelf" portal software product which contains all of the key features required to operate a functional portal website. At a basic level this includes user membership, role management, and content authoring and management. At a more advanced level it also provides tools for promotion and search engine optimization, banner advertising, affiliate relationship management, and hosting.

• consists of a mature core portal framework that provides a solid foundation of building block services that developers can leverage to create a robust web application.

• uses the Whidbey ( ASP.NET V2 ) Provider model for data access; enabling it to integrate with any data store. The product ships with support for both SQL Server/MSDE 2000 as well as a MS Access.

• has the most advanced web skinning solution available. Application logic and web page layout are separated and can be designed and modified independently. A software developer and a web page designer can collaborate without the risk of interfering with each other’s work.

• follows real world best practices for constructing web applications using ASP.NET. This includes a logical data access layer ( provider model ), business logic layer ( using custom business objects ), and presentation layer ( skinning ).

• allows for multiple portals ( web sites ) to be served by a single IIS/ASP.NET hosted account. Portals are managed by a common code base and database to minimize the ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs.

• highly extensible framework allows for custom modules to be built in your ASP.NET language of choice and compiled as private assemblies. The necessary files can then be bundled as a compressed package and uploaded to the server where they are installed directly into the runtime portal environment.

• has an established open source community infrastructure ( currently 45,000 members ), which fosters grass roots academic participation and collaborative support mechanisms.

Pricing and Availability

DotNetNuke 2.0 is now generally available for free download. The complete application source code is distributed under an industry standard BSD ( MIT ) open source license; providing the maximum freedom in both non-commercial and commercial environments. More information about DotNetNuke can be found by visiting http://www.dotnetnuke.com.

About DotNetNuke

Shaun Walker of Perpetual Motion Interactive Systems Inc originally released DotNetNuke 1.0 as an open source project on Dec 24, 2002. The code base represented an evolution of the Portal Starter Kit, an essential reference implementation for building ASP.NET applications, originally distributed by Microsoft with the .NET Framework 1.0.

In the past fifteen months, the application has grown from 10,000 lines of managed code to over 50,000 lines of managed code. The DotNetNuke support forum is the most active and dynamic community forum on the www.asp.net website. There are currently over 45,000 registered users and the membership continues to grow at an exponential rate.

The DotNetNuke Core Team consists of thirty dedicated members who have been hand selected by Shaun Walker based on their exceptional participation in the DotNetNuke open source community. Team members come from a variety of technical and business backgrounds and contribute in different key project areas depending on their specific skill set.

About Open Source

The basic idea behind Open Source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, and people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

For more information, press only:

Shaun Walker
Perpetual Motion Interactive Systems Inc.
(604) 504-0514
sales@perpetualmotion.ca
http://www.dotnetnuke.com

Happy Valentines Day!

Posted by: Shaun Walker

2/14/2004

The long anticipated release of DotNetNuke 2.0 Beta 1 is finally here! This release represents both a ground up rewrite of the core architecture as well as a multitude of new application productivity features. Although this release was anticipated quite some time ago, the sheer magnitude of changes took much longer to complete than expected - this was mostly due to the added complexity of legacy upgrade issues as well as resourcing contraints.

The true focus of DotNetNuke 2.0 is extensibility. In a nutshell this means we want to provide users at all levels the ability to leverage the core portal functionality but at the same time provide simple mechanisms for complex customization. Basically this involved converting a relatively closed system to a more open architecture. This philosophy is consistent with the focus of ASP.NET V2 and actually exemplifies the same Provider model used in Whidbey.

Although we strive to deliver the highest quality software possible, it is very important to understand that this is a Beta 1 release and therefore should be treated as such ( ie. please do not install on production servers ). We will be following up with a Beta 2 release on March 6th followed by a final release to coincide with VSLive in San Francisco ( March 23rd ). These time frames provide us with the opportunity to address any issues which arise during the Stabilization phase.

Please note there are some known issues in the Beta 1 release. The core MS Access Data Provider is not complete in the Beta 1 package due to insufficient testing. We will be including it with the Beta 2 release. In addition, there are no examples of the new HTML skins or containers included due to time constraints. Again, there will be some good examples included with Beta 2.

Happy Valentines Day!

Posted by: Shaun Walker

2/14/2004

In case you were wondering, the enhancements to DotNetNuke 2.0 are not simply focussed on one specific application area but rather provide benefit to a wide range of community stakeholders:

Administrators - portal administrators benefit from an improved, cleaner admin interface. Modules now have an "action" menu which provides access to all module related features. Administrators can add new admin modules and tabs to their portal. The integrated Recycle Bin prevents accidental loss of data. New portal settings allow you more control over the management of administrative tabs.

Hosts - a robust Exception handling system allows the host to monitor application errors complete with rich metadata. There is also a Private Assembly Validator to ensure the PA modules your install conform to the XML schema. In addition, the template capability for creating new portals has been expanded to expose more tab and module properties - allowing you to create elaborate portal templates for your clients.

IT Managers - caching has been implemented in a variety of high traffic areas to improve the application performance and reduce network chatter. The re-architecture of the data access layer also provides options for alternate lower cost database storage.

Developers - there are too many items to list in this area but it is safe to say that the majority of the limitations of creating custom modules for the framework have been addressed in this release. I will be writing a series of technical articles in the coming weeks to describe some of the more powerful enhancements. I also encourage you to read some of the documents located in the /Documentation folder and review the /DesktopModules/Survey module for a good working example of Private Assembly development in DNN 2.0.

Designers - the new presentation layer allows web designers to create rich HTML user interfaces which are completely abstracted from the ASP.NET framework. And you are no longer bound to a static layout for your site - your imagination is the limit with the free-form skinning capability.

Business - new features have been added to assist in search engine optimization. In addition, a new feature has been added which allows you to manage your affiliate relationships with your partners ( clicks and acquisitions ). Banner advertising has been improved as well to use a rotating scheme rather than the previous pseudo-random model.

 

Copyright 2004