It has been just about 5 years since my last overall update blog post was shared regarding DNN Platform, high-level technology needs, and future roadmap items. A lot has happened over these years, both for DNN itself, our community, and technology as a whole.  We have accomplished many of the goals that were outlined at that time, and we have some great new efforts by various DNN Community members that we need to revisit, embrace, and see where they will take the DNN Platform in the coming years.

Looking Back

As I look back at the last few years, we have had numerous big updates in the DNN Platform community, many of which were items that had been set out before or were critical items to the long-term success.  Some of these items include.

• Support for Async execution to provide industry standard support
• Support for oAuth SMTP configurations for better mail integrations
• Removal of Telerik to support a secure installation by default
• Refreshed theme for first-time user experience
• More than 70 individual fixes for security
• More than 400 changes for long-term system stability and usability

However, we have been truly focused on the critical tasks at hand.  Standing independently as a community, stabilizing the release process, and moving the community forward the best we can.  We have many new contributors to the community, and we still are fully open source, with zero funding towards development OR support of the platform.  

Looking Forward

Looking toward the future, we have to look at how we can continue to evolve the DNN Platform product to maintain its relevancy, the ability to adhere to industry standards, and implement functionality that will attract new community members to see the value in what is needed.  Thankfully, we continue to see strong community involvement, but as an open-source project with zero funding, we do get contributions on an as-time-permits basis from the community.  In the coming months, we have some critical areas of support that are of concern, including enhancements to the CKEditor, finishing some solutions that have been implemented, but not yet fully completed, and other continuation of support-type items.  These are all items that are documented in GitHub and reviewed within the Technology Advisory Group (TAG) meetings every 2 weeks. If you would like to attend, we can get the invite sent to you.  With these efforts, we can keep the current DNN Platform functional for years to come

These are the critical items, the table-stakes if you will that we need to keep DNN Platform operational, we also have some great community contributions that are underway that will help with other modernization.

Revamping of JS/CSS Management

Peter Donker started a discussion and is beginning work on improvements to how DNN manages CSS/JS files within the platform.  This is a great example of the community contribution spirit sharing the idea, having an open discussion regarding the pathway forward, and the eventual contribution to the platform.  This process helps to ensure that the ideas and paths are going to meet the diverse user base of DNN Platform and result in items that are usable by the community.

Many other items have been added in the past few days, and it's very exciting to see coming forward.

Support for an MVC Pipeline

Another great idea that is being discussed by a group from Europe, led by Sacha Trauwaen, are proposed changes to DNN Platform to better support MVC.  You can read about this effort in their blog post.  The first part of the goal is to get true MVC support to improve performance, limit dependencies on WebForms, and allow users to opt-in to the new behaviors.

This initiative, if submitted to the DNN Platform as an open source contribution, could be a GREAT improvement and option to make DNN even more attractive to those that may be pulled away due to the older-style WebForms technologies.  I'm excited to see how this group will continue on, and to have them participate in the same collaborative nature that we see with the JS/CSS, and other contributions.

Longer-term, there MAY be options for a transition to .NET made possible by this change, but I'll go more into that in a future blog post as right now the emphasis from the group is to get the MVC pipeline working.

This contribution would allow users to create themes with MVC, rather than Web Forms.  It would allow sites to utilize MVC OR WebForms on a page-by-page basis, and help to identify the areas that might not transition properly longer term.

Staying Up to Date

I thought this might also be a great time to remind everyone that all community contributions are reviewed in a public space. We regularly meet with the technology group to review concerns, address issues, and sometimes even just to provide a little moral support.  All are welcome to those meetings, and we are working on methods to better share meeting summaries from those; stay tuned for more information.

GitHub Issues is the primary location for starting a discussion regarding a DNN Bug, a proposed feature, or an eventual contribution that you may want to work on yourself.  Items logged in GitHub have better visibility and have a way to be directly tied to contributions, making release notes and other processes better.  It also allows the technology team to have a better understanding of what types of contributions we might expect and the people that we may be able to reach out to.

Feel free to comment below as well, in GitHub or via the Forums as needed, all areas are monitored and your comment will be seen!