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DNN Blog
Jan
20
Posted by:
Scott Willhite
1/20/2010 11:15 AM
2010 is going to be a great season for the DotNetNuke Community. Over the course of the last few months many foundational changes have occurred upon which much is building. Large ocean waves begin with ripples unnoticed in the deep, but as they approach the shore they are magnified. And I can’t help but draw the comparison as I look forward to this season like an expectant surfer!
So what’s been happening that could possibly foreshadow such a season of accomplishment? I thought I would outline just a few things and see if we can connect a few of the larger dots.
- Reorganization of the team. Way back in the fall, the “core team” reorganized from an unwieldy mass of folks into 6 more targeted “Community Teams”. Each of these teams has a specific area of charter and activities that not only contribute to the DotNetNuke application directly, but the general care and health of the community in general. Main areas of concentration include: Forge, Reference, Quality, Internationalization, Experience and Health.
- Peer Esteem Grant. In an unprecedented act of stewardship, DotNetNuke Corporation gave stock grants to 20 esteemed contributors selected solely by the contributors themselves.
- A Few New Team Members. In addition to the team members already blogged about, we’ve begun working with a few other names that you’ll soon see associated with the team such as: Jeroen van Menen, the initiator and lead developer of the popular Watin project for automated web application testing; Kevin Boles, a SQL MVP at SolidQ Mentors; and several others. Expect a few more this year... and consider volunteering yourself!
- Designer Challenge Skinning Contest. Timo Breumelhof, Cuong Dang, Salar Golestanian and the whole DNN Experience team coordinated our second ever skinning contest which will become an annual event culminating in a skin gallery showcasing designers and providing public resources.
- telerik integration. This feature of the core is new enough to still be considered a sleeper but will be a catalyst for many changes in the user experience of DotNetNuke users everywhere, including www.dotnetnuke.com.
- Initial Gallery Launch. Bill Severance, Matthias Schlomann & Néstor Sanchez brought the Gallery module, long neglected, up to date with many improvements to follow!
- Open Repository. After years of open source, but closed source control… we’ve opened up our maintenance repository at Codeplex for public browsing. There are many potential points of external integration as a result and it guides the way for some interesting developments around our own DotNetNuke Forge and associated Codeplex projects!
- Forum Upgrade. After almost two years of challenges, Chris Paterra has not only given us an enormous face lift, but also greatly improved functionality and integration with the core platform. We continue to work on incremental releases and deeper integration and continually improving performance.
- Major Blog Upgrade in Beta. As a foundational module, the importance of Blog cannot be overlooked. Antonio and his team (Don Worthley, Dario Rossa, Rip Rowan, Eoghan O'Neill) have done and amazing job with this update… stay tuned!
- Making use of User Profile Properties (User Avatar). Use of the User Profile Avatar in forums is just a foretaste on increased integration within DotNetNuke and on www.dotnetnuke.com. Expect several community oriented implementations of these features in the coming weeks and months!
- Taxonomy / Folksonomy. A pending feature of our next release, this brings site wide categorization and vocabularies to module developers with every interesting possibilities. For specific application, consider the DotNetNuke Forge and Snowcovered integration possibilities!
- Localization Tools. Peter Donker and the Localization team have been preparing for many months a strategy to encourage both participation in localization efforts as well as provide value to users and contributors. These efforts are in pilot stages and have great promise for building a strong international posture for DotNetNuke.
- Infrastructure Maturity. If you’re at all familiar with the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), you’ll understand some of the challenges of moving from an “organized” project to a mature development organization. With the addition of resources, personnel and processes (to support both the product and the company), our capability and capacity has improved drastically in the past year.
And this is only a partial list. There are many, many other things happening beneath the surface of the water, farther out in the deep, gathering momentum which will “hit the beach” in 2010. As we finish our own planning, both corporately and among the Community Teams, there will be more and more to share. But as I believe you can see, there is a lot of substantial and coordinated movement going on.
Grab your board… and let’s get ready to ride the DotNetNuke wave in 2010!
6 comment(s) so far...
Gallery module output still TABLE soup!
Interesting reading, thanks Scott :)
The updates to Gallery looked promising, but a quick look at the Gallery Demo site reveals that it's still outputting a mess of TABLE soup and inline formatting that is virtually impossible to skin properly and use in a production site.
They may be working toward XHTML "compliance", but this module (like many of the other dust gathering DNN sub-projects) still suffers from 90s style mark-up - complete lack of content-presentation separation.
*THAT* is what XHTML is about - it's not about just hacking tag endings to pass the validation tests! The sooner module teams (+ often the core too - ) grasp this, the quicker we can trim the fat from DNN page sizes and stop skinning being such a tortuous battling against inline formatting and after-thought CSS classes.
By B Johnson on
1/20/2010 5:58 PM
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Re: Community 2010: A Building Wave
@B Johnson ~ We agree. And there are an increasing number of folks both on the team and in the Community that are offering assistance and making contributions in the area of XHTML compliance. I am sure that Bill Severance and the rest of the Gallery team would welcome the help of any willing individual. XHTML compliance is only one variable at play, one of the amazing achievements of the Gallery release is that it upgrades... they have a LOT of legacy issues to contend with. I look forward to incremental improvements in the future. Please feel free to send suggestions to community AT dotnetnuke.com (or post in the forum). Thanks!
By Scott Willhite on
1/20/2010 6:08 PM
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Core module quality
Thanks for your positive feedback Scott - it certainly must be frustrating for the core team that even if the core was overhauled to better separate content/presentation (minimise/remove layout TABLEs, remove inline formatting, semantic CSS classes, cleanup of default.css to make better use of inheritance, etc), there would still be rafts of bad code coming from outdated modules.
At the moment I avoid most of the bundled modules because I presume they'll be poor quality (partic in their mark-up) hangovers from DNN v3/4. This probably means I'm missing out on better maintained gems (Forms & Lists perhaps?).
Personally, I'm all in favour of deprecating modules that are no longer up to scratch + maintained. Poorly developed components bundled with DNN bring down its reputation more than not including them in the first place. Certainly broken functionality + appalling output mark-up tarnished my first impressions (back in the early v4 days).
Where modules are too far gone, with too many legacy hangovers, why not start afresh with cleaner, modern replacements, with slightly different names? Retain the older version in a "deprecated" section of the "Modules install" screen until the user base is small enough, then move to downloadable add-on?
As you point out, DNN "core" modules rely on contributions from the community - I wonder if people are being discouraged from contributing by the far-gone condition of many legacy modules and the barriers of backward compatibility.
Perhaps once the "Skinning Contest" is complete, you should invite submissions to a "Core Modules Contest", including modern replacements for existing ones? The aim is for DNN to come with a well thought out selection of high quality modules built-in, instead of aging placeholders suitable only for superficial demos.
Kind regards, Ben
By B Johnson on
1/20/2010 6:56 PM
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Re: Community 2010: A Building Wave
@Ben -- Hmm, a Modules Contest... ;-)Welcome to open source and welcome to "free". While it is true that there is a lot of legacy markup out there, it's also true that there are lots of other module alternatives out there (www.snowcovered.com, and yes, we also agree that a solid base of key, free modules is important). But we can't do all the work ourselves, nor should we! The real success of an open source project lies with the community and contributors. This is where my focus will be for 2010, increasing the ability and recognition of folks to participate in an ecosystem that is both rewarding and fun.It's also easy to forget that creating new things is ALWAYS easier than improving old things. Because improving requires a way to move existing users into a newer version without disrupting them. We'll always welcome new projects... but new projects become legacy projects after their first rev! That said, you can expect to see some new life and changes in the Forge and module areas this year.
By Scott Willhite on
1/20/2010 7:05 PM
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Re: Community 2010: A Building Wave
Good job Scott :)
I'm intending to get the Visual Studio Starter Kit of the Community Edition to use it with Visual Studio 2010 Professional Beta 2. Do you think i should use 2008 instead?, or any other advise before I install the VS?
This is a fresh install of VS on W7 64bit and I can use both, what would you recommend?
By Sam_Oslo on
1/21/2010 8:23 AM
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Re: Community 2010: A Building Wave
@Sam ~ I appreciate your confidence, Sam, thanks *grin*. What I would really recommend would be asking this question in the Developers forums. I don't get to spend as much time with the tools as I once used to and there are far better folks able to answer your question. I know there are a few idiosyncracies with VS 2010 and that's where folks will be discussing them. Cheers!
By Scott Willhite on
1/21/2010 8:25 AM
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