Our organization is looking to put up a site utilizing DotNetNuke, and according to our consultant (who is less a .Net fan and more of a Joomla fan), there is ‘anecotal evidence’ that the Community version is crippled in a way that pretty much forces you to get Pro if you wish to have a reliable site.
I have serious doubts as to the validity of this claim, but just in case I would be very interested to hear if this is or is not the case, based on use of the product and it’s community and professional versions.
Specifically, if there are bugs/issues/etc in the community version that are resolved only by upgrading to pro.
I apoligize in advance if I posted this on the wrong stack exchange, but figured this was the best bet 😉
Quite the opposite.
Disclosure: Scott Willhite, Director of Community Relations for DotNetNuke
There is absolutely NO limiting code in the DotNetNuke Community Edition, and I am quite proud of that fact. We have made a purposeful and, frankly, very challenging business decision to keep our Community Edition the base of all of our software. We engage in enhancement of the base Community Edition to produce Professional and Enterprise editions using the same extension points that are available to all developers. And we constantly add features and capability to the Community Edition which benefit all users of the platform. Any suggestion to the contrary is unfounded and misleading.
Some companies choose to limit their free editions (by number of users, number of content items, number of pages, etc). Some require branding that can’t be removed in free editions. Others specifically use their free editions as “hooks”, knowing that a customer of any size will be forced to upgrade if they want to continue using the product. None of these approaches is acceptable in a truly open source environment and none of them are in practice with DotNetNuke.
It is fair to say that we have resources working on proprietary extensions to distinguish our Professional and Enterprise edition offerings. But this is the same privilege we enable hundreds of thousands of others to enjoy who develop for or implement proprietary solutions using DotNetNuke. We are also customers of those extension points and so are constantly improving them for everyone’s benefit because we don’t just use them as marketing points, we base our companies products on them. Every release of DotNetNuke contains both substantial Community Edition as well as commercial edition enhancements.
To specifically answer your question… while there are no constraints within the Community Edition of DotNetNuke, and it is a highly functional application out of the box, it cannot address every need (no product can, all projects have unique requirements). This is why it is constructed with well defined extensions points and why there is such a vibrant open source and commercial ecosystem supporting it. So it is fair to say that the solution, out of the box, may not address all of your needs specifically? But between Professional & Enterprise options, 000’s of commercial extensions on Snowcovered, 00’s of open source options in the DotNetNuke Forge and myriad developers and integrators in the ecosystem (in addition to your own skills), I am confident that any need can be met in the way that makes the most sense for your or any application.