Enter DotNetNuke

I first came across DotNetNuke in early 2003 as I was preparing to write my own content/article management system. I thought the idea was great. I was really excited to see such a cool new system that was open source come on the market. The problem was, the system was new, and there weren't many modules that were useful to me and I lacked the skills to code my own modules. I felt the technology was not mature enough to use at that time, but decided to keep an eye on it.

At the same time, I was looking at the asp.net forums. I was impressed by these forums. They solved my aging forum problem, but did not solve my user management or content woes. Then, it was promised that they were going to integrate it with DotNetNuke.. Ah Ha! But alas, they never completed the integration satisfactorily.

As I was debating on what to do, everything was was "put in the hole" (railroad term, look it up). The wife and I were informed of the impending arrival of our twins. All expansion plans, redesign plans, anything other than every day operations on MLS were put on hold. My moderators led by the amazing Dwight (shout out to Dwight, sup man) took over maintaining law and order for the most part. I tried to make updates as often as possible. It took about 2 years for our lives settle back into a manageable routine.

I pulled my old plans out of the mothballs and started working on things again. This time, DNN was much more mature, much more stable, and had a good selection of modules to help get my site moved into a new era. There are still some gaps between functionality on the current MLS and the new DNN counterpart. Most notably the photo contest. I decided earlier this year that I was going to overlook the gaps and press forward with the conversion regardless. I'll fill in the gaps later. If I wait for everything to fall in my lap, it'll never get done. The initial schedule I set for myself had today as launch day. Unfortunately I didn't make it. Some of problem is financial delays, some of it is due to time constraints. Regardless, I got it started at least. 3, almost 4 years in the making!