DNN SoftwareReviews of dnnsoftware.com

I had a notice from my developer one week ago that we had a payment due, at that time I informed him that I had not gotten anything prior as far as an invoice. He contacted you with no response. Then 2 days ago, he gets a note that the account was going into collections. Seriously? 1 week after I got the invoice. If I could switch platforms on the fly, I would.

DNN core is a good product. The problems arise when you add 3rd party modules then try to upgrade to a new version of DNN. Especially if you have any modules that are no longer supported by the developer. We no longer use DNN because of the HUGE frustration with upgrading. We had a couple older modules that were no longer supported that broke our site when upgrading DNN. But there was nothing we could do about it. We've since moved on to a much more robust CMS system (Umbraco) and it's so much better.

Our organization committed wholeheartedly to using DNN as we were in desperate need of a multi-featured CMS that worked in a full Microsoft environment and it seemed to be the best fit for that. In less than three years we have grown our install to 65+ portals, each with unique needs in both functionality and design, and our web growth is expected to continue at this rate for at least the next year. Unfortunately we now find ourselves reconsidering our decision on a product that we are already deeply invested in. Firstly, documentation for all aspects of the product are severely lacking. When I run in to an issue on our system and go to Google to see if anyone else has encountered the issue almost always with DNN the most recent info I can find is for DNN 5 and was posted in 2010. None of this information is of any use to me running DNN 7/8. I know that it has been said that documentation is a priority for them this year but I have yet to see an improvement. Secondly, software upgrades have been no end of headache for us. I have had to do more system-wide rollbacks due to failed upgrades than I have done successful upgrades. Our very first upgrade resulted in our entire system serving out pages just fine but no one could log in to anything for 3 weeks till I rolled it back. On at least two occasions the rollback has actually been at the suggestion of DNN support because of an incompatibility between our portal content (note this is content not custom modules) and a change in the software, one of those times it was months before there was a bug fix to correct the issue, that was a fault in DNN itself, and we were able to upgrade. We still haven't completed our upgrade to DNN 8 though we have been at it for 2 months due to an issue with deprecated functions and it's use by 3rd party skins (for which there was no documented fix other than changes suggested to skin designers back with DNN 6), and us trying to schedule the least disruptive time to our users since we now have to plan for at least a days outage for something that should only take minutes. We have no idea how we will be effectively able to plan and schedule the other 4 upgrades that are due out this year simply because we cannot predict whether any of them will work or what sort of outages they will cause. I would also like to note that we do indeed have a test environment for upgrade testing and even that has not helped prevent production outages due to upgrades. Lastly, while overall I have had positive experiences with the support I have received and the technicians I have dealt with have all been reasonably knowledgeable and helpful, the communication speed with support has been useless for out needs. We are currently paying for yearly support for Evoq Content Basic which only gives us access to support via a generic email or the ticketing system. While it usually only takes a day or two to get a reply from support that is much too long when your production web environment is down. Having to communicate mostly though email with the support techs has caused issues to take weeks to solve when it turns out the issue could have been solved in mere hours. For us to get access to phone support that we sometimes desperately need it would cost us more than twice the already substantial amount we pay in support yearly, and we have neither the budget nor the confidence to spend that much more on this product.

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.

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.

There is little to no service if you use modules that were not developed by DNN. Stay with the modules that come out of the box