I wondered if people already moved to Oqtane?
Is it ready to replace DNN... or is Oqtane more a development framework rather than a real CMS with theme and modules?

I noticed Vendor 2sxc already does both worlds? And Easydnn or DNNsharp?

I know a few people are tinkering with it, but we're still here.  😉 

DNN continues to be our "go to".

I have been looking at Oqtane to see what is about. I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7KnkHe3AXY gives a good view on the current state. Which is basically that it has a long way to go if you want to use it as a CMS. Shaun explains that it is a developer tool and you'll notice that all efforts are around that. So, security, deployment and the latest tech shiny stuff.
What you also see is that the market place is pretty empty. It will need much more traction to get this thing flying. Because it is all connected. An empty market place means few buyers. Means few vendors. Means a small community.

If you look at the video you see mostly DNN with a new logo and less features. Under the hood there is another world but there has been a lot of copy pasting :-)

DNN means the world to me and my agency right now! It's stable, secure, the community and the tools around it are the best part of this DNN journey.

I believe the decision of which CMS to use it's hard and so difficult to predict because of so many factors and things you have on the table. But from my little experience I can tell everyone that DNN it's a great and smart decision right now.

Hopefully, this status quo last many many years! :-)

Posted By Marco Alvarado on 1/7/2024 12:31 PM

DNN means the world to me and my agency right now! It's stable, secure, the community and the tools around it are the best part of this DNN journey.

I believe the decision of which CMS to use it's hard and so difficult to predict because of so many factors and things you have on the table. But from my little experience I can tell everyone that DNN it's a great and smart decision right now.

Hopefully, this status quo last many many years! :-)

 

I absolutely love to see comments like this!  It warms my heart in so many ways and motivates continued contributions.  To DNN 10 and beyond!!!

 

I've installed and played with Oqtane a few times since early 2022. The last time I tried there were lots of errors with the automated Azure deploy, so that round went less well than our previous attempts. I will definitely keep watching it. Some key developments that seem likely soon are a) overcoming the search engine issues out of the box and b) the appearance of solid and ready to use modules/extensions and themes. I've seen progress in various areas and playing with 2sxc in Oqtane is VERY encouraging. But...

As an agency building stuff for clients, DNN is still our happy place. From hosting and development to custom themes and the 2sxc (Swiss-army-knife) approach to mini-apps and structured data, as well as the highly customer-useful solutions we can build almost-on-the-fly and as-needed. Another really nice thing is that DNN does not stop us from using modern tools. From React to SveltKit and Astro and popular CSS libraries like Bootstrap and Tailwind, to Webpack and Vite and others helping and integrating into our workflows, DNN proves to be extremely useful and adaptable no matter what exciting toys, err, I mean, tools, come along. The way we work in and with DNN has changed a lot over the years too. Its amazing how much of our work is in VS Code using all kinds of extensions, taking full advantage of Git/GitHub, remote workspaces, IntelliSense, and much more. And I haven't even mentioned how phenomenal DNN+2sxc is as a backend against our mobile apps.

DNN might seem "dated" based on its age and a quick review of its technologies, but its got a lot of useful flexibilities that give it a real sweet spot in building modern websites efficiently and effectively.

I think Jeremy is touching a lot of valid topics. From innovation point of view, Oqtane is interesting. From a business point of view, DNN still wins for me. Even if you feel your company can make a shift to .NET Core, ignoring everything you built so far, that doesn't mean your customers can make the same move. Persobally, I believe much more in evolution than revolution. If your customers want to build in .NET Core, they can. If new talent wants to build in .NET Core, they can. DNN allows for a hybrid approach. 

I believe I'm one of the most vocal advocates of Oqtane 🩸 and probably one of the few who have productive sites running on Oqtane.

I highly recommend that you get involved, but not because it's a DNN ☢️ replacement.

As of 2024, if you need a cost-effective, awesome CMS then you should stick to DNN☢️+2sxc 🌟 (totally unbiased 😉).
DNN ☢️ is mature and solid and battle tested, and there are so many things that you can do easily - especially when creating web sites. Eg. skinning/theming is easy and fast to do.
We have 500+ sites running with DNN ☢️ and are adding new ones on a regular basis.

As of now we have three production sites running on Oqtane 🩸:

* https://oqtane.me/ - a microsite to help developers get started and provide *.oqtane.me domains
* https://status.2sic.com/ - a microsite which was basically our first run at dogfooding and had to run outside of our network
* https://blazor-cms.org/ - a well designed, production grade website which gets listed in Google (not easy to do)

But the future is .net core, and we cannot anticipate if Dnn ☢️ will ever get there, or if DNN in 2034 is still on .net Framework.
Which is why our development style today is Hybrid ! No matter what we develop, we use strategies that allow us to move the code elsewhere, incl. Oqtane. Everything we create for our customers on Dnn could be moved to Oqtane within minutes 🚀.

To make this possible, we completely re-engineered 2sxc🌟 to run on both Dnn ☢️ and Oqtane🩸, and developed best practices which make this possible.
Basically anything created with 2sxc today in the modern way can be transferred to Oqtane and it will work identically.

Oqtanes 🩸 strength compared to Dnn ☢️: it's .net core, it's Blazor 🔥, it's the latest Identity-Framework, etc.
When we develop a large application (100 days+) which is mostly C# code, we start on Oqtane, because we feel like it's a heavy investment which should use the latest tech for various reasons. Note that as of now, we still prefer Angular to Blazor for the UI, so that aspect is not important to us, plus it allows us to move our work to another .net-core platform if ever needed (eg. DNN.core 😉).

Oqtanes 🩸 weaknesses compared to Dnn ☢️: It's new and not widely used yet . Don't get me wrong: the community is growing quickly and there is huge momentum, but if you run into "very normal" problems such as "how do I integrate fancybox (JS library) into the theme" you may have to figure it out yourself - and it could be very challenging.

Since Oqtane 🩸 also works with 2sxc 🌟 we've got most of the CMS challenges solved, but creating a Theme in Oqtane probably takes around 25x longer than with Dnn; mainly because the development setup requires constant recompiling and restarting of Oqtane for every change. This is very inefficient, but we (2sic) is working hard on making this simple as well . Multi-Language also does not really work in a way that websites would need it.

So as of 2024-Q1 I would say: if you just want to create awesome CMS websites, stick to Dnn ☢️ and 2sxc 🌟 for now. We hope to have a viable Oqtane-based setup by 2024 Q2 or Q3, but even then you can still play it safe and stick to Dnn.

We will continue to invest a lot of resources into Oqtane, to make it comparable, and will certainly work with both platforms for many years to come.

As a contributor to this thread back in 2020 (and whose needs and concerns are just as relevant today) I find these past few comments quite intriguing, as I've been gearing-up to migrate my online role-playing game system (built totally in DNN at https://browserquests.com) away from DNN to, well, something else (ABP Commercial, Oqtane, WordPress, Unity, GameMaker Pro, RPG Maker MZ, a custom solution in .NET 8... anything but DNN). My impression was that DNN had been dying a slow death for years and I've since migrated dozens of original DNN sites to WordPress (which, for me, made so much more sense, given their small, static, brochure-like nature). Now all I have left is my custom BrowserQuests game in DNN and I've been trying to figure out how best to migrate that, too.

These latest comments, however--coupled with the sheer magnitude of a rebuild (my system consists of hundreds of custom stored procedures, tens of thousands of lines of VB.NET code and a hacked Bootstrap 4 theme that serves my purposes nicely)--is making me rethink whether I truly need to migrate away from DNN. Indeed, I'd like to be convinced to stay!

Personally, I believe I've taken the technical aspects of the game as far as I can on my own--perhaps it's time for me to reach out and ask for help. At the same time, I just learned of the upcoming DNN Virtual Conference coming up in a few weeks, which actually looks quite interesting--I may attend that as well. I think that if I could be reasonably assured that there's little reason to migrate away from DNN for the next few years at least, I'd prefer to stay.

Curious to what others think...