Why DotNetNuke is Terrible
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 | Design, DotNetNuke, Improving Code, Programming, Ranting, Usability, Venting, Web Development
I really could go on and on about this, but just a few notes.
1. Forced Registration to Download their Software
When you go to DNN’s web site and sister sites, like the new DNN Events site, the first thing you have to do before you can download anything is register an account. Now, it’s not all bad because it’s free and I guess they just want to track popularity (ever heard of Google Analytics?), but the registration process takes too fucking long. I registered an account to download the new Events Module beta about 10 minutes ago and still haven’t received my “verify your account” email. Sorry, DNN team, I’ve now lost all interest in your beta.
Not only that, but it’s not clearly obvious you have to register. They bury the instruction to register in their rather long and boring content. If I go to wordpress or drupal’s site, I see big freakin links to download (no registration required of course). It wouldn’t be so bad if they had a big link that said “Register and Download” but no, of course they don’t.
Which leads to my next point,
2. They really don’t support or discuss usability and accessibility
DNN modules and the DNN platform itself are so hard to use. Their website is hard to navigate, most of the icons don’t make sense, and the forums are cluttered and don’t work in all browsers. You can’t make a post in their forums in Safari. Sorry, Safari users, outta luck. Get firefox, I guess. No one seriously talks about how to make the admin screens and layouts of their modules more functional, faster, and easier to understand.
Most of the modules we have to buy (another point) are riddled with awful and outdated front-end code, and have the absolute worst Admin screens.
3. You have to pay for most of the modules
Now this isn’t that bad. I mean, a software developer’s gotta make money, and some people run their business solely off of DNN modules, right? Ok, but step up your game and make a module worth paying for. Refer to point #2.
More later, I have to get back to work.
1 Comment to Why DotNetNuke is Terrible
Hi Joe,i thought I’d post a few quick answers for you
1. you never have to register on any other site except dotnetnuke.com to get core or project releases. A few of the project teams have chosen to set up other sites where they let users play with pre-release/beta versions of the modules, but production versions should always be downloaded from dotnetnuke.com
2. i have to mostly agree with you on the look & feel of many dotnetnuke sites and modules - it still feels like code designed by developers. We are making changes all the time to address this e.g. all project modules now get audited for xhtml compliance, the core will automatically support html, xhtml transitional or xhtml strict doctypes etc, and in dnn 5.x “admin” modules will now be treated just like ordinary modules so can be swapped out/updated just as per any module
3.theres plenty of free modules out there (i used to keep lists @ http://www.cathal.co.uk/Default.aspx?tabid=80 but haven’t had the time to keep it up to date). The forge @ http://www.dotnetnuke.com/tabid/824/default.aspx is growing steadily with lots of opensource modules, and the announcements forum @ http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/112/scope/threads/Default.aspx is a good place to watch out for freebies.
June 3, 2008