I'm very new to DNN and am trying to evaluate it to see if meets our business needs.  I've installed DNN and played around a bit, but I can't find some the big features I'm looking for.  I figure I should ask the experts before I dismiss the product.

The biggest feature I'm looking for is Portal Inheritance.  Our non-profit company has hundreds of local chapters nation wide.  We'd like to give them each their own website to faciliate communication.  I would like to create one portal and then have multiple sub-portals that inherit the style and content from its parent.  This way, if content was updated in the parent portal, it would also be updated on the child portal.  These sub-portals also need to have the ability to add/update their own custom content. 

The closest thing I've discovered in DNN to this is using the Templates when creating a new portal.  Unfortunately, the layout and content are only copied once to the new chapter.  If the template changes, the portal that was created with it does not also update.

Is there anyway I can accomplish what I'm looking for using DNN?

Thanks,

Neil

Currently DNN doesn't support an easy way to share the "content" between a portal so that when one is updated they are all updated. We are working on enhancements to our Engage: Publish module to support such functionality, sharing articles across portals with the ability for the host portal to updates and make changes to that content. I hope to have them ready for testing in the next few weeks.

If by page design you mean the graphical look of the page then in DNN this comes from the skin that is applied.  In DNN this can be done either at the Host or portal level.

If you apply a skin from the Host level then when you make a change to that skin it will be applied to all portals/sites that are using it (ie 1 change changes all sites).

With the menu (assuming you are using the menu skin objects), this is created dynamically so they will show the content that you have in each site.  Once you have a solution to copy the main site content to the 'sub' sites then the menu will dyanmically change.  Of course you can also hard code some menu items in the skin using absolute URL's and once the skin is updated then all sites using that skin will also get updated.

HTH

Antony