Awesome news! Congratulations everyone.

I'm as happy about this development as I am with my relevant request being the highest-rated one on Community Voice. So, what should I ask for next? :)

I was very happy then...

"This acquisition will significantly improve the value proposition of the commercial editions of DotNetNuke"

I got mad!

PLEASE offer this as an extension so small sites can enjoy the fundamental requirement of controlling URLs.

In the past, other aspects of DNN Pro have been made available as non-pro paid add-ons. I think that is absolutely critical here.
Any other situation would be bitter.

Actually this is great great great news.

Proper URLs were definitely missing.

@Phil Speth - you are correct that in the past we have made some aspects of DNN Pro available as commercial extensions ( ie. ActiveSocial, Document Library ). This typically occurred during the phase that we were integrating the acquired functionality into the product. You will notice that we have followed the same approach in this case... the Url Master module will continue to be available on the DNN Store until we ship DNN 7.1.

@Lance Long - DNN Corp does not plan on getting into the business of offering individual commercial extensions, as we feel this would be detrimental to the third party vendor ecosystem. It is also important to note that as I described in my blog, the provider model for URLs still exists in the platform, so there is certainly an opportunity for a motivated ISV to develop and offer a new commercial alternative for controlling URLs.

I'd just like to add to Shauns comments regarding availability of Url tools for DotNetNuke - there are several offerings in the DotNetNuke store right now for Url Management, so anyone needing specific functionality in community may be able to utilise these. And, as Shaun says, there is a new opportunity for someone to enter that market, not only for products, but also for specialised consulting around assisting customers with Url strategies, particularly in the space of helping in the migration of sites from different technologies onto the DotNetNuke platform. The more success DotNetNuke finds, the more people there are that need assistance in coming across from other platforms, and generally all these will need Url assistance. The new features that will go into DNN 7.1 will help facilitate bringing these customers on board, but many will still need assistance, and it's a good opportunity for talented people to target.

I was really excited about this until I read the part where you are basically taking this great product off the market for Community editions users. You are seriously going to piss off A LOT of your best users with this move. Please reconsider. What is wrong with continuing to offer it as a stand along product?

Congrats! I look forward to seeing the changes in 7.1.

@Jay Mathis - it has always been the stance of DotNetNuke Corporation to focus on delivering complete solutions to customers - in our mind "the value of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". By focusing on a complete solution it also allows us to ensure the integrity of a fully integrated package, with full regression testing to ensure that a customer can be confident that all of the features are 100% compatible with one another, work well together, and have a commitment for future upgrade support. This is much more difficult to accomplish if we were to offer a variety of stand-alone modules. Not to mention that the independent vendors in our ecosystem would be uncomfortable with the idea of DNN Corp as a module vendor, as they would view us as having an unfair competitive advantage. As stewards of the ecosystem it is our responsibility to ensure there are many independent ISVs developing innovative products and services, and one way we accomplish this is by maintaining the delicate balance and ensuring there are plenty of opportunities for everyone.

Shaun,

when I made my suggestions in Community Voice (by the way I'm happy so many people supported both of them) - I was thinking of a feature that would be available in the Community edition (after all, it's called Community Voice).

With other rival platforms providing SEO-optimized URLs out of the box it is essential that DNN presents a solution for this...yesterday. I've been using Community Edition for some years now and I've been losing customers to Wordpress and other platforms, one of the main reasons being that they think they're losing SEO with DNN due to the way it forms URLs.

I'm a huge DNN fan and I constantly support the platform in every given opportunity, but this is important - by taking the module off the market and providing features only to the Professional editions you're actually weakening the Community Edition - even if it is for a limited amount of time. This means more and more customers switching to other platforms - bad for me, bad for DotNetNuke Corp., bad for every DNN developer.

I understand there must be a balance between paid and non-paid software features to justify the cost of paid software, but my personal opinion is that URL rewriting functionality is not a very good choice for that.

Shaun,
Your answer is simply not in any way acceptable to people that have invested greatly in DNN and the products you are taking off the market.
The fact is that the functionality provided by Bruce's products have been critical to many of us. To say we can go shopping around for an alternative doesn't fly. We have a portfolio of sites that use these products and you can sugar coat the end of life issues all you want but it is a big obstacle to have to replace this.
You know very well that the quality of offerings in in the DNN store varies to an extreme.

People aren't looking to freeload. We have supported Bruce over the years purchasing his module and upgrading them.
If you talk about being a steward of the Ecosystem it looks like you are talking about your DNN Professional Ecosystem.

I am a longtime supporter of DNN and I hate ranting but there are ways to do this without leaving so many people out in the cold.
I would be happy to talk to you about this if you are interested.
(I wanted to say this, I don't mind if it is posted live or not)

So what happens to legacy URL Master customers on pre DNN 7.1 installations? Is their only upgrade path a commercial license? #fuming

Shawn - I don't I make my point clearly. DNN Corp also offers a basic and Pro version of the HTML module. You didn't remove the HTML just because you made a Pro version of it. Why not have a basic version of the URL module? Functionally, all it would need to do is 1) Remove the .aspx extension 2) convert to lowercase 3) replace space with "-" . Anything more than that could be in the pro version.

:( However, like @Jay Mathis, we our vendors still have a feel to be abandoned from DotNetNuke ecosystem. We originally hope that this awesome product should be replaced the old url friendly provider, at least, it should expose some core APIs to be applied like that "Globals.NavigateURL" in the community version. In this way, it will be more helpful to build more cooler modules.

So all of us who have one or multiple copies of URL Master are now left with a product that will not be updated and will be crippled (in some way) for community users? This is presented as a good thing???

If it is so important to offer this for the Pro versions why not license it for Pro and leave it available to those of us who have clients that cannot afford $2K a year but need a real URL re-writer.

You took the best doc system away from us and now the best (only) URL re-writer has been taken too.
I think this is going to make more negative impact for DNN than losing Doc Manager and Active Social put together.
Shaun, as always, makes a well reasoned and well written case for this move but it leaves many of us with a significant problem.
(Again)
I have been using DNN since 2006 but am now going to look seriously at alternatives. Not sure I trust DNN at all any more.

I can certainly see the benefit of DNN Corp. acquiring such a fantastic module but I have to echo the sentiments posted earlier by @JayMathis. URL Master is so widley used throughout the community this is going to present a problem down the road for all of those CE sites that rely on this module for not only URL Rewriting but for things like 404 error handling, more elaborate 301 Redirect requirements, dashes replacing spaces in page names, and a lot more.

These are such critical SEO aspects that many sites require. What will happen to those CE sites when a future DNN version presents compatibility issues with the last publicly available version of URL Master? Not upgrade? Find an alternative vendor and start from scratch? Think of all the SEO implications of all those sites that rely on this module.

I understand the premise of offering complete solutions but does that mean DNN Corp. is going to try an buy up all the popular and quality module vendors removing those products from the open market for DNN Community Edition users? I hope not.

The full feature set of URL Master would provide such a benefit to DNN CE as well. What is the harm in including all the features of URL Master in the CE edition? Especially since so many CE sites rely on it.

Congratulations! I look forward to seeing the changes in 7.1.too!!

Ganhar Dinheiro em Casa

I aggree with @Jay Mathis, I have a lot of customers in the online casino industry that have not interest in the Commerial Edition of DotNetNuke. The do however value thier SEO rankings and the iFinity Url Master product. As for other available Url provider products on the market, We have evaluated some of them but nothing compares to the iFinity Url Master. I must say that I am very dissapointed in the outcome and none of Shaun's comments offer me any solice.
(I whish I knew which vendor DNN Corp will be purchasing next so that I can totally avoid any of thier product offerings).

At the moment I am a very disgruntled DNN fan.

Congrats to both Bruce and DNN corporation.
But Number of features offering for Community edition is too few as mentioned in http://www.ifinity.com.au/2012/12/18/DotNetNuke_Corp_acquires_iFinity_Software
I hope there will be some mind change for this end there will be more offering for community edition as well.

@Sotiris - I agree with your argument that all editions of DotNetNuke need to have SEO-optimized URLs out of the box. This is the reason we made the "Human Friendly" URL provider the default option a few years ago. That being said, I recognize that there are some deficiencies in the current URL provider - which is why the Url Master product from iFinity was an attractive commercial alternative. And perhaps this was not clear from the acquisition announcement, but one of our goals was to strengthen the core platform from a URL perspective so that we are more competitive with rival platforms. If you review Bruce Chapman's blog you will notice that there a number of valuable enhancements being made to the core platform which will benefit all product editions. At the same time there are also some premium features which are being reserved for the commercial edition, primarily in the area of administrative user interfaces.

@Phil - I would encourage you to review Bruce Chapman's blog which outlines the feature breakdown. The Core Platform table column outlines base functionality and APIs that will be available in all product editions. And we have committed to providing an upgrade path to DNN 7.1 for existing Url Master customers.

There seems to be a lot of criticism of DNN Corp in the blog comments related to a perception that we opportunistically look for popular modules so that we can remove them from the market. Yes, it is true that we have done a number of acquisitions of modules over the past 3 years. But it needs to be understood that in the majority of cases it was the vendors themselves who approached DNN Corp looking for opportunities. It goes without saying that it is not easy being an independent software vendor. The rapid or continuous growth of a business can sometimes result in demands that exceed its limited capabilities or resources. And it is not something I take any pleasure in pointing out, but there are certainly instances we are aware of where commercial module vendors have gone out of business due to a variety of unfortunate circumstances. Now I don't want to downplay the fact that unexpected business events create challenging situations for customers. But they are also part of the natural flow in any ecosystem.

Shawn - I read Bruce blog announcement as well, specifically the feature chart. I posted this question on his blog too but perhaps you could also explain. The chart itself is a little confusing. Most of the features are marked as "Yes" in the Core Platform column and then "No" in the Community edition column. In fact, there are only 3-4 "Yes"s in the Community edition column, none of which are particularly useful.

So the confusion is how something could be included in the Core and not Community. Your comment above about strengthening the core "human friendly" provider gives me some hope, so could you please explain exactly what we WILL be able to with the Community edition?

Having been in DNN space since v1.04 and having literally hundreds of DNN clients, I really hope I don't have to go tell all those clients that either they are locked into DNN 7.0 with no upgrade path, other than going Pro) or they have to now buy *another* URL solution. That won't be an easy conversation to have or give them a lot of comfort in choosing DNN as their web platform.

After reading, and re-reading, and re-reading again, the announcements and the feature chart, I *think*, I *hope* that perhaps this was just a case of an unclear communication.

For those that aren't aware, the URL Master module (as-is) simply provides an admin interface that sets values in the web.config. I *think* what this acquisition means, is that they are simply moving those admin UI elements on to the relevant parts of the DNN UI (page settings, site settings, host settings,etc) for the commercial editions only.

If I am correct (please I hope I am correct), you will still be able to do all the functionality things as before, but you will just have to do them directly in the web.config. If this is true, then no problem. As long as the settings are documented somewhere, this is not a huge deal, just a bit of an inconvenience for non-technical users.

In fact, I can see a community forge project quickly springing up to provide a consolidated UI similar to the current URL Master UI to set the web.config settings for the users of Community edition.

Please confirm I am right...

Congratulation Shaun Walker and all DNNer!

The writing is on the wall for the CE. Those who cannot read it are just ostriches on a beach.

@ebrandford - I am not sure how a module acquisition which results in significant improvements to the core platform could be interpreted as "writing on the wall for CE"? The fact is, since we introduced a commercial product edition 4 years ago, we have dramatically increased our investments in all product editions, including CE. This was made possible by a business model which allowed us to increase our dedicated resources so that we could accomplish much more in terms of keeping the platform relevant with feature enhancements and improvements in product quality. We have always treated CE as a first class citizen, developing it in concert with our other product editions and adhering to an aggressive monthly release cadence. And we will continue with this approach in the future. So I am not sure who is the ostrich?

@Jay Mathis - yes, the core platform that underpins ALL editions will be enhanced with new URL management functionality. This means that the APIs will be available and those folks who are technically savvy will be able to take advantage of them. And customers who have utilized Url Master in the past will have an upgrade path so that their URL processing rules will continue to be recognized and supported in DNN 7.1. The commercial edition is intended to be a complete "turn-key" solution and therefore will contain additional administrative user interfaces which allow non-technical users to configure the URL processing rules and settings. And customers of the commercial editions also get the assurance of professional support, knowledge base, etc... to help them get the most out of the product features. Revenue generated from the commercial editions is used to fund the development and integration of future product features in all product editions.

@Shaun, maybe the backlash is from a misinterpretation of the unclear changes regarding what will be included in the community edition. I also felt the same way many on this board do, until I read Jay Mathis' inquiry and your response. All the functionality will be there. You can configure the module manually(web.config/db), otherwise you need to upgrade DNN to get the easy UI on the admin panel. This makes infinitely more sense than either of the official posts about this merger. Thanks Jay!

I too was confused by the various explanations provided regarding availability of features in CE vs. Commercial editions of DNN. If I understand correctly it appears all the functionality will be available in CE, just not the UI. Providing the URL rewriting benefits of URL Master in all editions is a great move. If it takes editing the web.config in CE for some features, it's only a minor inconvenience. So, I guess it's not as frustrating a situation as I originally interpreted it as.