A few of us are discussing whether to move away from Slack as a collaboration tool in favor of the forums on the new community website. The two main drawbacks with Slack are (1) that it is "yet another tool" and therefore not immediately available to someone who wishes to join a conversation and (2) that old discussions fade away in time (and also not searchable etc).

The DNN Technology Ecosystem Advisory Group continues to meet on a weekly basis mapping out the future of DNN. The meeting agenda and minutes are shared here in blog entries so that everyone can see the progress being made and conversations occurring in the group.

This May 11th meeting we discussed about the 9.4.0 feedback, release planning, the Dnn upgrade service and more.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you probably know there was a DNN party earlier this month in Switzerland. The party was called DNN Connect and held in the Alpine mountain village of Champéry. As both the president of DNN Connect and the location manager for this event, I had quite a bit to do with proceedings this year. So the hole I dropped into when I waved the last attendee goodbye was immense. A severe case of the post-conference-blues. So besides picking up "regular work" again I've been staring at my monitor thinking "now what?" Well, time to reflect on this event.

In this session, we covered some of the new structured content solutions put in place to handle content on the new DNN Community website (https://dnncommunity.org).

If you’re in the developer community, and especially if you’re using or near any Azure conversations, you’ll continuously hear someone suggest Let’s Encrypt when it comes to securing your domain name.  You know, that thing you do to allow your website to use the HTTPS protocol to get that lock in front of it in the web browser.  I’ve tended to use NameCheap.com these days.  They’re cheap like their name suggests, and they’re super easier to use.  However, things just got even easier.

I’m not yet out of Europe.  I’m sitting in my hotel room in Paris, enjoying the sounds of the city, just blocks away from the Eiffel Tower.  I spent about an hour last night after midnight, exploring the city.  I can’t help but reflect on what DNN has done for my life.  It’s quite literally changed it, for the better, time and time again.  As a minor and superficial example, over 15 years ago when I started with it, I never thought it would lead me to Switzerland or France, much less riding a scooter around the Eiffel Tower after midnight.  I’ve come a long way over the years, and so has our community.  We’ve all grown, and this conference marked an important new milestone in our mutual journey. 

If I were to tell you that I am excited to make this announcement, it would be a severe understatement.  I'm not going to draw it out, because you're already here...  We have our own official website that's 100% for the community and 100% built and maintained by the community.  We are completely in charge of our destiny as it pertains to community features and efforts.

What happens if one of the top developers within the ecosystem takes on the biggest challenge known to mankind?

It's done. Mandeeps has created his own e-commerce module. Tjep's digital agency has lots of experience with e-commerce (Magento, NopCommerce, Nbrightbuy/Openstore, HotCakes, SmithCart etc.) and created a review for you

As I look to the future with DNN.Platform we have an amazing platform, however, the platform has been growing for more than 15 years. With 15 years of growth, we have a number of things that have evolved that are "less than perfect' along the way. However, as we look to move into the future we have amazing things on the fore-front. .NET Core, Blazor, you name it we have a lot of new technologies that could be implemented that will help the platform grow. This growth, however, will not come without a few growing pains along the way, so it is worth discussing on a regular basis to keep everyone on the same page. One of these growing pains are continued API management which can cause upgrade issues, we want to plan ahead so let's dive into what is coming.

A welcome change of recent is the introduction of the Release Candidate (RC) into the new release cycle for DNN Platform.  Having early access to an upcoming RC gives everyone valuable insight into what is coming in the official release.  Not only do we get a chance to learn and prepare for use of the new version within our own test environments and those of our clients, but we also have a chance to participate in community-wide testing and provide valuable feedback.  This is an area in which the Technology Ecosystem Advisory Group could really use your help.  The more people that touch each Release Candidate, the greater the stability and quality of the platform.