Not long ago, DNN released version 5.01.00 of this framework, marking a major milestone in the evolution of this framework. For the first time, the version 5 series has been officially endorsed as being “production ready,” meaning that the DotNetNuke Corporation says that this version of DNN is ready for you use for your websites.

DNN 5 promises that fastest, most secure, and most flexible release of the DNN framework ever. DNN has always had a great selection of modules for you to use for free, such as the Forums module, Blog module, Survey module, Wiki module, Chat module, Store module, Map module, and so many more. DNN 5 brings a rewritten module called Forms and Lists, which allows you to build things like a custom feedback form to present to your customers.

With DNN 5, you now can integrate cool features such as Widgets into your website. Widgets are a great way to interact with your website visitors. They allow you to import JavaScript-based widgets to do things like adjust the design of the site, import videos from sites like YouTube, and more.

This release also makes your website more valuable by implementing SEO (search engine optimized) features for you such as human friendly URLs, Google Analytics, a Pure CSS library, 301 redirects, improved XHTML and ADA compliance, and more. These features are some of the most important in our current economy, where every little bit of edge can help you get ahead of your competition. You DO want to be ahead of your competition, don’t you?

Another very notable feature that is now found in DNN is content versioning. You are now able to roll back any text or HTML content in the HTML module that is included in DotNetNuke. You can also require content approval, allowing you to stage your new HTML content until the right person looks at it. Once they approve the new content, it will be pushed out to your website for your website visitors to see. This feature alone is with the price of DotNetNuke (which happens to free).

If you’re a developer or power user, you may be happy to know that DNN implements technologies such as jQuery, Internet Explorer 8 web slices, improved support for unit testing, .Net framework 3.5, support for any data source, an extensive provider model, and a web-based dashboard showing the “health” of the site. DNN is also an open API, allowing you to extend nearly any feature that it has, such as the Token Replacement Engine, which allows you to do things like build custom template engines.

We could go on and one with the new features. Just know that you can trust the DotNetNuke Corporation to constantly add new features, fix bugs, address security issues, and not allow the framework to get “stale.” They regularly evaluate the latest and greatest technologies out there, making sure that you too can take advantage of these new technologies without having to worry about your level of knowledge or expertise. Roll out your next website using DotNetNuke today!

It’s simple, if you are a shared hosting or fully managed server customer here’s all you have to do!

A little about DotNetNuke

If you’re not familiar with DotNetNuke, it’s an open-source content management system (CMS) that is extremely popular. In fact, at the conference Shaun Walker (father to DotNetNuke) stated that the dotnetnuke.com community has reached over 500,000 users and I forget the exact number but it was something like 4,000,000+ downloads. Also announced OpenForce was the availability of DotNetNuke 4.7 (and if you’re planning hosting dotnetnuke at appliedi.net, don’t worry our one-click installer was already upgraded to 4.7).

Today website builders like our own free sitebuilder are commonly used by novice internet users that want to build a website without learning HTML. A CMS like DotNetNuke evolves the sitebuilder and I suppose would be the Web 2.0 equivalent of yesterday’s website builder. With DotNetNuke (or almost any other CMS) you’re able to assign multiple users roles to your site and allow them control over specific areas of the site so that they can edit or maintain the content in that one area.  You add to that the extensibility of hundreds of free and paid templates/skins for dotnetnuke and hundreds of modules for everything ranging from a guestbook to a full blown e-commerce application (like aspdotnetstorefront) that are just simple click and deploy applications and you start to see the power of DotNetNuke. Want to change your site’s look and feel? Just change the template. All the content remains the same but the look is completely different.  Want to add a forum to your site? Just enable the built in forums or purchase one of the 3rd party forum modules and all your users are already enabled and can begin posting immediately.

DotNetNuke is definitely an exciting application and one we’re proud to have hosted and supported on our platform since it’s inception.

A little about the DotNetNuke OpenForce 2007

Tom from seablickconsulting has a pretty good day by day review of all three days at DNN OpenForce and they can be viewed here:

• DNN OpenForce 07 Day 1
• DNN OpenForce 07 Day 2
• DNN OpenForce 07 Day 3

In fact, Tom’s blog is really chock full of DNN information so I highly recommend subscribing to it.

Expect many more DNN related blog articles to come from us in the coming weeks and a few very exciting DNN related announcements.