A Comparison with DotNetNuke (DNN)

DotNetNuke, popularly called DNN is a robust ASP.NET based application used to build a complete website.

The official website of DotNetNuke can be accessed at http://www.dotnetnuke.com.

You will find sites powered with DotNetNuke all over the Web. One of the unique features of DotNetNuke is that users can build and customize their site very easily using administration tools provided by the application. Moreover, advanced developers can tweak the source codes and implement their own functionalities. One such classic example of advanced customization is DotNetPanel (http://www.dotnetpanel.com). It is a powerful hosting control panel for managing Windows 2003 Servers.

DotNetNuke ships with a simple discussion board but it does not contain all the features of Community server. It is not possible to create a blog or photo and file galleries using DotNetNuke. On the other hand, Community Server is mainly used for the creation of blogs, forums, photo and file galleries, reader, and for showcasing external blogs using roller. You can make use of both DotNetNuke and Community Server to create high quality website by taking advantage of the rich features provided by both applications. You can easily deploy them on a single website under two different directories since the technology used by both DotNetNuke and Community Server is ASP.NET. You only require a server that supports ASP.NET and SQL Server 2000 or greater. While DotNetNuke is available free of cost without any restrictions, Community Server is available as both free and paid for versions. The free version of Community Server is called Express and it has certain restrictions for usage. You will learn more about the different editions in the next section of this chapter.

A complete discussion regarding DotNetNuke is beyond the scope of this book. You are advised to refer to the books Building Websites with VB.NET and DotNetNuke 3.0 by Daniel N. Egan (ISBN 1?904811?27?2) and Building Websites with VB.NET and DotNetNuke 4 by Daniel N. Egan, Michael A. Washington, and Steve Valenzula (ISBN 1?904811?99?X) published by Packt Publishing.