DNN SoftwareReviews of dnnsoftware.com

As an end user of DNN, hosting over 50 sites, we use a lot of 3rd party skins and modules. After every update, we've had a hard time working with DNN support and Developer support when things break. And they always break. It seems every skin uses different development and design methods, so the implementation with DNN is never the same. Some things live in this folder on one skin, in another or are implemented differently on another skin. A move toward encouraging (rewarding?) 3rd party development consistency would go far. Perhaps design/development standards to be met to be included in the DNN store. Updates and upgrading: Skins designed under one version suddenly have issues in another. Yes, it's the skin developer's responsibility, there don't seem to be an effective 'official' developer network fosters and supports independent development -- think about the Apple Development Network as the Mac was growing. Passionate developers. A good, free, development network will foster that. DNN needs better reference and documentation. In our experience, the most relevant docs to an issue are often old (2 versions old). As well, support for DNN Training aimed at content creators and maintainers detailing best practices etc would be helpful.

DNN software has met most of our needs overall but..... We’d like more testing on the upgrades and patches that you supply to avoid rollbacks and issues. One suggestion we'd really like to make to you is to provide some in house skins in the DNN store that are approved, tested and built by you. We would know then that they are compatible with your product and DNN approved. We would also like you to review the templates and items that are put in your DNN store for quality and that a solid and a consistent product is delivered to us. For both the non Evoq and Evoq systems. Please expand what is offered in your store and flexibility in design and layout. We have a hard time browsing your store and finding items that meet our needs or that are compatible with the latest version. We also have paid good money for skins which vanish and we are left scrambling to move them to a new skin that is compatible with the latest upgrades - very frustrating. We'd like some flexibility in design and layout as well as some flexibility with the Evoq side of things. We are finding that since we have many sites on DNN that we need the flexibility in adding some Evoq permissions an editor and manager is very limited. It would be nice to have the ability to add a few roles of our own using that bar. Documentation - seriously lacking. Forums need to be kept up to date, written documentation is hard to find, reference documentation on how to utilize a skin and modules is very hard to find and frustrating. We need documentation for all levels from the user to the developer. We are paying for pro level support and we have an email address and its difficult to get a hold of you. We would appreciate having better support options since we are paying for this service. We find that dealing with the developers of the skins is much faster and we can resolve issues quickly through them. I'd suggest following the model of a solid CMS (wordpress etc) with sanctioned skins and a solid CMS front end for the end user that is easy to train someone in. It would make things so much easier. We do appreciate your webinars that you offer but it would be nice to have some dedicated more to skins and modules to assist us. Also some basic ones that we can use for training our staff.

Excellent initiative for DNN Corp. I think this will separate DNN from the pack: Listening to their clients, being a resource, and excellent service. Upgrading DNN version for me is really a challenge. However, with DNN support team, they were there to troubleshoot the issue. Kudos on the Canada support team!

I'm a front end developer. For me it was easy enough to manipulate the visuals of the site. However I usually edited the templates or added custom css/html/javascript to the page. For our non technical editors (mostly age 30 - 50) the system was limiting and finicky. Also i lacked a .net developer to truly customize the site so making changes to the modules/ or creating a unified look for the admin side was hard.

Sadly, DNN7 is just chock full of annoying little bugs and glitches, which never get addressed in upgrades, and the "support" that you get as a professional-level customer is just completely pointless, despite the absurd amount of money that they charge for it. It really feels like DNN is a slowing dying beast that isn't being maintained and upgraded, and is very quickly falling further and further behind other CMS's on the market. The recent corporate mentality of trying to turn DNN into an instant revenue generator as resulted in their focus shifting from wanting to create a great and reliable system that could easily dominate the entire market to just a barely mediocre platform plagued with issues, old styling, old code, and clunky, clumsy usage. It actually feels like a Microsoft product that they just keep tweaking and messing with, even though it would be better to just scrap it all and start over from scratch with a completely new mindset. Not sure I'll be staying on the DNN platform for the long haul, but if I do, I'll definitely move back to the free community edition and stop shoveling my money into the corporate management pockets that are responsible for bringing a once great application to its knees. One can only hope that it survives the corporate beat down, and that the mindset changes back to a desire to build something great, more than a desire to make a great amount of money from it.

There are a lot of issues with WebForms and that is why MVC has taken off. Unfortunately, when MVC started gaining traction, DNN decided to rebrand as Evoq and chase a social media platform instead of concentrating on their core competancy (a development platform). Now, they are trying to play catch up and are behind the 8 ball. I used to love DNN, but now its more painful than enjoyable to use. DNN Professional Review Assuming that DNN Professional is the main way they make money, you would think they would put more time/effort into making it better than the Community edition. After using DNN Community for over a year, I decided to push for our company to purchase Professional so we would get DNN support and a few other nice features. The support was absolutely horrible. One month after purchasing DNN Professional, they released DNN 7.0. Two months later, they completely dropped support for v6, but there were still so many bugs in v7, we could not update. Then, when I found a bug in DNN6, I had to go back and forth with support for 2 weeks to convince them it was a bug. Finally, I contacted some DNN guys on G+ and they immediately recognized it as a bug. They went to the support person and had them escalate it. The end result?? It will be fixed in a future release (I now know it was fixed in v7.2). Also, all their 'Core' modules are waaay out of date. If you ever recommend they dedicate some resources to update them, the response you will get is, "Its open source, so the community should update them". This should be something they do for their Professional customers as a value add. What can they do to fix all this? I like the idea of a custom portal that lets you stand up a site in a few hours with security and page management already built in. But, what DNN needs to do is recreate this framework in MVC and make it easy to add. No hoops, hurdles or black boxes to configure. In addition to this, they need to make their Professional platform a worthy upgrade. They should pay attention to customer feedback and implement features the customers want (maybe a voting system). Finally, they MUST improve support of their paying customers. Bugs and quick fixes should not be allowed to hang around for years.

Great CMS, easy to install and use. Prompt customer service

We have been using the DNN Evoq Content platform together with BlueBolt Solution's PackFlash suite of tools for a Global Marketing Communication portal. The site is a database-driven website serving up content on dynamic pages. It allows our users to quickly find content using a powerful search engine. Content is categorized by content type, categories (that we create) and contains all types of documents from PDF, mp4, image files and recently, a PowerPoint slide application (similar to SlideSource).