Welcome Joe,

First of all: DNN is an excellent choice :-)
Reasons for me:
1. It is really easy to use for editors (my customers). Easier than Wordpress and much easier than Drupal.
2. It is stable and secure. Much safer than Wordpress and Joomla. Drupal is equally secure and stable.
3. The community is friendly and professional. The Wordpress community consists of 99% of clickers and a handful of developers who know what they are doing.

I think it is fair to say that Drupal and DNN are in many cases equal. So, the difference is technology (.net vs php), usability (DNN wins) and footprint (Drupal is a favourite last couple of years for governments)

DNN ships with not too many extensions by default. This is actually the case with many CMSses. And that makes sense as you want to have a light core system that can evolve and innovate.
You can extend with free, open source modules (click 'extension library), paid modules (store.dnnsoftware.com) or build your own.

Dropdown menus
- The default theme supports dropdown menus. Just create subpages and behold

Newsletter
- https://github.com/DNNCom....Newsletter/releases is a free version. Personally I use other systems for this like Mailchimp or Campaign monitor but that might be a matter of taste.
David Poindexter updated this one recently and should work.

Survey
- https://github.com/DNNCom.../DNN.Survey/releases is an open source module. Last changes are some time ago, so please test. I use DNN Sharp (Action Form) or Live Forms (Mandeeps) myself as it is more powerful and combines with other modules.

Podcast (would loke to host mp3 files on our server if possible if not open to use providers like Libsyn.
- I am not familiar with Podcasts so not sure what is necessary for this. But if you check the sites of Mandeeps and Easydnnsolutions, you'll find something regarding media/content.

Yes I have notcied too that Drupal is favoured by governments. Not sure why. By footprint, do you mean DNN takes more space in database than Drupal? Or is Drupal more secure.

By footprint, I mean market share.

Governments were fond of 'real open source' which meant that the Microsoft stack was not an option.

And, no, Drupal is not more secure. I think it is equal. Both are well built from the ground up by people who are passionate and skilled.

Just a word to the Survey module: There is a little bug in it that can be fixed easily, this is only affecting sites with more than one instance of the Survey module.

To fix it, I published an SQL script, which is avalable here: https://github.com/DNNCom...DNN.Survey/issues/47

Happy DNNing!
Michael

I know I am late to the party but in case someone else comes across this.

I've been using DNN for over 12 years and have learnt an incredible amount in that time.

Firstly, DNN is an incredibly powerful and versatile platform.
Secondly, if you build sites for clients and they don't use it regularly they forget how to do the editing - this is the same for other web builders Wordpress etc.

I've managed to develop some easy to maintain websites using DataSprings Dynamic Forms (other Form systems are avaialble) and the standard Reports module - eliminating the HTML module.

I'm biased but I think DNN is second to none :-)

See https://github.com/DNNCommunity for a collection of open source DNN modules.
See https://store.dnnsoftware.com for both open source and commercial modules

Also, DNNSharp.com, Mandeeps.com, EasyDNN.com for three prominent commercial module developers.

2sxc.com and vanjaro.com for special mention.

And many apologies to many I have for no particular reason, and I've likely left off some really good people..