DotNetNuke - Pro vs. Community Versions

Question

Our organization hopes to host a site using DotNetNuke, and according to our consultant (who has fewer .Net fans and more Joomla fans), there is “overwhelming evidence” that the community version is corrupted in a way that pretty much forces you to get Pro if you want to have a reliable site.

I have serious doubts about the validity of this requirement, but just in case I would be very interested to know if it is or not, based on the use of the product and its communities and professional versions.

In particular, if the community version has errors / problems / etc that are only resolved by upgrading to pro.

I apoligize in advance if I posted this on the wrong stack exchange but decided it was the best choice;)

Answer 1

Quite the contrary.

Disclosure: Scott Willit, Director of Public Relations for DotNetNuke

There is absolutely no restrictive code in the DotNetNuke Community Edition, and I am very proud of this fact. We made a focused and, frankly, very complex business decision to support our Community Edition at the core of all our software. We are participating in the extension of the base Community Edition for Professional and Enterprise editions using the same extension points that are available to all developers. And we are constantly adding features and capabilities to Community Edition that benefit all platform users. Any assumption to the contrary is unfounded and misleading.

Some companies prefer to limit their free releases (by the number of users, the number of content elements, the number of pages, etc.). Some require branding that cannot be removed in free publications. Others deliberately use their free publications as “hooks”, knowing that a client of any size will be forced to upgrade if they want to continue using the product. None of these approaches are acceptable in a truly open source environment, and none of them work with DotNetNuke in practice.

In fairness, it’s worth saying that we have resources working on proprietary extensions to distinguish our Professional and Enterprise offerings. But this is the same privilege with which hundreds of thousands of other people can enjoy those who develop or implement proprietary solutions using DotNetNuke. We are also customers of these expansion points and therefore we are constantly improving them for everyone, because we do not just use them as marketing points, we base them on the products of our companies. Each DotNetNuke release contains both significant Community Edition versions and commercial version extensions.

To answer your question ... while in Community Edition DotNetNuke there are no restrictions, and this is a very functional application out of the box, it cannot satisfy all needs (no product can, all projects have unique requirements). That's why it is built with clearly defined expansion points and why there is such a vibrant open source and its commercial ecosystem that supports it. Is it so fair to say that a solution, out of the box, may not take into account all your needs? But between the Professional and Enterprise options, 000 Snowcovered commercial extensions, 00 open source options in DotNetNuke Forge and countless developers and integrators in the ecosystem (besides your own skills), I’m sure that any need can be met in a way that has the most meaning for your or any application.

Answer 2

I would definitely disagree with this assessment.

The only Pro feature I can think of can affect reliability is a different caching provider (with which we had more problems than the standard caching provider). I consider this a proposed web farm script provider, but in most typical scenarios this will not be a big problem.

A community is the same community edition that has been used on real sites for many years, and there has been no harm to it since the release of the Pro version. The Pro version is just a few custom extensions on top of the community version, most of which are quite optional for the daily use of the website.

A comparison of the versions on DotNetNuke.com shows the following inequalities:

Advanced Content Workflows

Content negotiation ensures that any of your users affected by a change in content can approve updates before they start living. Workflow permissions can be configured in the top-level hierarchy at the site, page, and module level. The mechanism of business rules allows you to work with an unlimited number of states and reviewers.

Granular permissions

Advanced permissions at the page, module, and folder level provide advanced security rights that let you determine exactly which content participants can edit these modules on each page.

Advanced site search

The search engine includes rich query syntax with support for Boolean searches, phrase searches, relevance searches, wildcards, fuzzy searches, and groupings. Includes a real web spider, capable of indexing any site, which eliminates the need to implement the ISearchable interface within the modules.

Configuration manager

The host user can manage various configuration files that control operation at runtime. Download a configuration merge script that you can use to automate many more repetitive and complex configuration operations.

Content

Content providers and software developers make all the changes to their website on a physically separate staging server. You push the milestone site to production when all changes have been checked, tested and approved.

My editable pages

Links to all pages and site modules to which the user has permission to edit are displayed, which allows you to effectively edit pages

Document management

A complete document management solution that allows your organization to store, control and view documents online

Module caching

A database caching provider for module contents that stores module contents in a centralized database for faster page loading without requiring web server processing.

Page Caching

Allows your site to save the entire page of displayed content in one of three different caching locations: memory, database or disk. Increases page delivery speed for site visitors.

Distributed caching provider

More efficient use of resources in large web farms

File Integrity Check

Checks the files in the installation and reports any inconsistencies that may affect the reliability of the website.

Health monitoring

Periodically registers your website to detect crashes and notifies you of any problems. It also ensures that the site remains in the memory of the web server for faster visitor accessibility.

Security center

A host-level feature that dynamically downloads a list of known security vulnerabilities affecting your version of DotNetNuke and provides a navigation guide to get the latest update

Full Documentation Documentation

Includes over 2800 pages, divided into user and superuser manuals.

Online knowledge base

Provides guidance for DotNetNuke administrative tasks and answers to common technical questions.

Impersonation user

A host-level feature that allows you to impersonate another user who is a member of your website. Locate the user by name, and then click the icon to accept their identity to browse the site using user permissions while maintaining the confidentiality of their password.

Beyond the three elements of caching, I see nothing there except icing on the cake. In addition, using many of these features, they are not as impressive as everyone sounds, and the core of the DNN community is not completely devoid of any similar features. Caching modules, in particular, is available in the community edition, there is only one provider. In addition, page caching is possible in the community edition, it just does not come with built-in page caching providers.

Answer 3

I would not agree either. I have been working with DNN for many years, well, since version 3, and there is not much conspiracy to force CE users to upgrade to Pro. I have deployed over 100 Community Edition sites (seriously, without exaggeration), and the ONLY PE sites I worked on were usually government or educational institutions where they needed to organize content or take advantage of the OpenDocument Library module. For me, this sounds the same as you say - your consultant gives his opinion that .Net and PHP make his recommendations.