DotNetNuke Ups The Ante With Major New Release

DotNetNuke the leading open source content management system for .Net announced a major upgrade to all three versions of their product yesterday including the free community version. While Word Press and other open source CMS systems are also attracting lots of users and attention, DNN which runs only on Microsoft’s .Net platform boasts more than 700,000 web sites using it. That is a staggering number considering that no Linux/Apache servers run .Net

To be sure one of the major new features in this new 6.0 release is that DNN is now closely integrated with Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform. In fact the cloud is a major focus of this release of DNN. In addition to the Azure option, DNN now offers something they call storage folders that allow you to store data on cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft (more providers will be available in the future).

Another “cloudy” feature is enhanced integration with Microsoft’s SharePoint server. You can now publish documents stored in SharePoint to your DNN website seamlessly. SharePoint is one of the best kept secret successes from Redmond. It seems everyone is using SharePoint.

Another big news item is that the core DNN platform has been rewritten in C#. This was an often heard request from the community, but doesn’t stop anyone from writing extensions in other languages.

DNN gets a lot of flak from the open source community sometimes because it only runs on a Microsoft platform. But with this release DNN is embracing Microsoft by bringing a tighter integration with a wide range of Microsoft technologies than virtually any other CMS can offer. Tying their caboose to the Microsoft engine like this is a bit of a calculated gamble. If Azure falls flat or SharePoint falls out of favor, it could hurt DNN.

But Microsoft integration is not the only theme in this release. There is also for the first time an integrated e-commerce shopping cart available. Up until now there were 3rd party shopping carts available from the DNN store. Also this release has built in integration with the DNN store for 3rd party extensions and there are thousands of them.

All of this is all great, but maybe the biggest news in this release is the enhance interface making this the easiest to use DNN ever. I had a demo of the product by Shaun Walker, Co-founder and CTO for DotNetNuke. I was blow away by how easy it is to create even a sophisticated ecommerce site quickly and easily with the new DNN version. The guys at DNN have really outdone themselves this time.

So if you are looking for a new CMS solution, be sure to check out the new DNN.