Comments on: CMS Shootout: DotNetNuke vs. Joomla vs. WordPress

By: Dawning

Dawning — Mon, 25 May 2009 20:35:29 +0000

@Nathan: I’m inclined to agree. Though my experience with DNN is far less than WP, there’s a few things about DNN that cross me as blatantly sloppy (thinking of URL structure, support documentation, etc).

That said, it looks like there’s a lot of helpful guts in DNN, I’m just having a hard time with the whole being forced to a specific platform.

For what it’s worth, anything you say uses Linux because of PHP/MySQL/Apache.. Well, it should run fine on Windows with the WAMP tool. I think there’s a Mac port of WAMP/LAMP in the works too, not certain there though.

By: Nathan Youngman

Nathan Youngman — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 06:19:15 +0000

Not to be a fanboy, but I’m fairly impressed with how far you can take WordPress. Last fall I finished a humanitarian web site with WordPress, using a custom template that uses categories, tags and page parents for dynamic navigation. It worked out pretty well, if I do say so myself:
http://www.globalaid.net/

By: Sunny

Sunny — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 12:57:39 +0000

I use Googling more about Joomla/Drupal, DNN – One common concern I noticed is SEO in DNN is not so easy & also read ” The core DNN Search has not matured yet – but this can be used with 3rd party modules.” on DNN forums ? Any idea paul , is this true ?

By: Timo

Timo — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:28:39 +0000

@Paul. Thanks. It seems a lot of people think you must use Tables with DNN skinning, but that’s not true. I think the reason is that the old default skin that came with DNN was a very bad example (full of tables). In fact anything you can do in HTML / CSS can be used in a DNN skin, there are almost no limitations.
I agree the way though the admin interface is a bit of a hassle, the easiest way to update the skin in DNN is to FTP the new files.

By: Paul Lefebvre

Paul Lefebvre — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:28:53 +0000

@Timo: It was a hassle for me, at least compared to editing WordPress themes. I found the whole table-based design of the DNN skins I’ve used to be tedious to work with. Plus you had to then Zip it all up and upload back to the site (using the Admin tool) after each change.

By: Timo

Timo — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:20:52 +0000

Paul, could you explain “Modifying skins in DNN was a major hassle” a bit? To me DNN skinning does not seem to be to difficult, but I’m biased

By: Paul Lefebvre

Paul Lefebvre — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:34:27 +0000

@Bob: Separate admin area may be safer, but it is not easier (at least for me). The security groupings in DNN are very flexible. You can create any time of groups you want and assign sections of a page to be visible only to specific groups.

@Bruce: I haven’t yet tried DNN 5.0, but improvements to the layouts/skins is most welcome. Modifying skins in DNN was a major hassle.

By: Bruce Chapman

Bruce Chapman — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 05:05:31 +0000

There was a new release for DotNetNuke (5.0) on Christmas 2008. The 5.0 release was in the works for most of the year, and contains big improvements in terms of skinning and default layouts. This fixes most of the problems with the previous default table layouts, IE-only CSS and non-compliant html. Of course, a talented designer could get great sites with any 4.x version of DNN because the skinning engine is so flexible. However, as most people start with the default skin and modify from there, this latest release will ensure that simple sites start from a much better base.

By: Bob Keeney

Bob Keeney — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 04:09:55 +0000

I would argue that having a separate admin area is safer and more secure than having it integrated. You can, however, set Joomla up so that you can enter into the admin area directly from the main site.

Joomla’s main weakness, in my opinion, is that it doesn’t have good security groupings. You have public, registered, publisher or administrator security levels. There are several 3rd party modules available that overcome this shortcoming however.