(Photo by Chris Hammond)
Yet another good year has gone by and the R2i team had a great time in Las Vegas last week at DevConnections conference. Time flies, doesn't it? It was great seeing old friends and new faces this year at the conference. DevConnections this year definitely has picked up attendance quite a bit compared to last year despite the uncertainty of the economy.
Our crew headed to Las Vegas early on Monday last week to set up our booth and showcased some of the cool projects we have been working on the past year. This year, R2i is proud to have Cuong Dang, Ian Robinson, and Nick Christy and speakers on various topics from design, skinning, module development to enterprise deployment so we had a big group of people there. We met up with a few friends after setting up the booth and caught up before the rush of attendees comes on Tuesday when the day starts.
Just like every year, people were excited to see Shaun’s keynote and some of the interesting news in the community and future roadmap of DotNetNuke in 2011.
After talking to some of the attendees at the exhibit hall, I rushed to the keynote just right on time and quickly took some notes to share with everyone who weren’t there. So here’s a quick recap and hope you enjoy:
(Photo by Chris Hammond)
DotNetNuke Corp
- 2010 has been a great year so far in terms of awards and recognition for DotNetNuke framework and some of the PR work done by DNN Corp. DotNetNuke brought home some of the awards from Garner 2010 Cool Vendor, CRM Emerging Vendors 2010, Always OnDeman Top 100, The VAR Guy’s Open Source 50, and 2010 Readers Choice Visual Studio Magazine.
- From a financial perspective (in case you're curious), DotNetNuke Corp. secured another $8 million dollars in funding that helps improving financial ability to expand the company as well as improving the framework.
- Over 900 DotNetNuke PE customers and 100 fusion partners signed up in less than 14 months is an impressive record for DNN Corp. Congrats!
- One of the biggest news of the year in terms of PR and Marketing for DotNetNuke is that the State of Kentucky announced DotNetNuke is the first open source CMS that become a standard platform for government projects.
Ecosystem
- Currently DotNetNuke has more than 6 million downloads, more than 800,000 registered users, and more than 600,000 websites in the world powered by DotNetNuke. One of the bold moves from DNN Corp. is that registration on DotNetNuke.com website is no longer required for downloading the framework. This might affect the opportunity to capture user data for future marketing purpose but the good thing is it makes it easy for people to adopt DNN and we all can expect the number of downloads to go up next year.
- We all know event like this often brings the community together. In 2010, there was quite a bit of efforts between community and DNN Corp. to organize events and bring great speakers, content, and the community together. DayOfDNN Europe was the first major community event this year organized in Paris by the Network of European DotNetNuke Professionals and the French DNN User Group. Ian Robinson and I along with Chicago DNN User Group organized the DayOfDNN Chicago in early October as well. OpenForce Europe or SDC 2010 was organized in Zeist, the Netherlands was also a big hit. And here we were at the last major DotNetNuke conference of the year, DNN Connections in Las Vegas. Those events were great success and brought so many fantastic groups of people together to learn about the framework and have fun!
- DotNetNuke Hackathons are also making big hits in cities like Washington DC, Orlando, and St. Louis. These smaller scale events bring people from all over the world together to participate online and in person. The next DotNetNuke Hackathon will be in December in Seatle focus on the new Microsoft WebMatrix and Razor.
DotNetNuke Framework
- Exciting things coming to the next release of DotNetNuke 5.6. This version will be released with a few enhancements such as the new and improved default.css, improved search functionality, configuration manager, auto portal alias mapping, asynchronous support in Google Analytics, and a few other performance enhancements.
- DotNetNuke 6 (codename Hadron) is going to be "the next generation web content management system platform for Microsoft .NET" with some killer features and enhancements such as:
- UX enhancement: focus on administrative interface with a more modern approach using ajax and modal pop-up rather than page postback in current version
- Instant on: focus on performance and make it easier to get DNN up and running as well as installing modules and skins (apps as they called it) seamlessly within your portal
- Social and mobile enablement: seamless content publishing to popular social channels and mobile web browsing support for variety of web devices
- Integration with Sharepoint, document management, and folder providers for external storage as well as content staging
- A few items on performance will also be a focus such as database optimization, javascripts, css, viewstate ‘minification’, and CDN support
- There have been quite a few DNN releases this year (and very timely in my opinion), but it makes people wonder whether they need to be in the latest version. Also, this didn’t seem to be a sustainable approach so in 2011 (and forward) there will only be 2 releases per calendar year. The first version of DotNetNuke 6 will be due Q2 and 6.1 will be in Q4.
(Photo by Chris Hammond)
For me, it was great seeing old friends and meeting new people. I always enjoy going to this conference and socialize with people that you work with virtually and never get to interact in person. Sorry that you didn’t make it to Vegas this year but I hope to see you sometimes soon at regional, national, or even international events. Cheers!
P.S. If you missed the event, be sure to check out the interviews and photos at http://dnncon.r2ismash.com