Well the week after the week that was the release date and the post mortem of responses and comments and feedback has been great overall.  The extra size of the installation may not have been appreciated, but when opened, plenty of surprises..

Great skins, new forums, gallery & blog (beta mode) and wow, a huge step forward.

The focus on the core team is stabilisation. No enhancements, unless it's absolutely necessary and even today - I see a 3.0.13 build going through with fixes.  What I'm finding is a bit difficult is the intpretation of bugs in gemini to see how I'm going to be able to help. 

There was discussion about sub projects, if visit gemini you'll see how the modules are now broken into sub projects.  Shaun / Scott, someone with more decision making power than me will be reporting some interesting changes that may be coming up.  The purpose for this is to involve the dnn community in a broade sense and I'm looking forward to this new direction.   Overall, the timing seems to be right, and the maturity of DotNetNuke is becoming visible to it's time to *dust off the roadmap* and  get moving forward on some new initiatives.

There will be focus now on the 3043 plan with developers now able to finalise their DotNetNuke 3 upgrades and new modules, and while there are no where near as many as there are for 2, basically, most of the developers have had plenty of time to learn and gear up become familiar with the new namespace and methodology.

Now this leads me to another issue that I read about - CSS - tableless CSS designs and I was happy to read that Nik from Speerio.net really does agree with me, although we've not worked on projects together, we've both decided that while we can lighten the load of tables in a skin, CSS and NO tables is just not there yet -we're not there, we're not going to exhaust ourselves mentally trying to put that dang SQUARE in the ROUND hole. It will get there one day but I thought it was a big step forward with the fact I had used all css in the design of the new skins and think this is a good working example to learn about the elments of dnn skinning.

Now I mentioned about Shaun's ability to be an open listener and in the core team chats, we do have an agenda - it used to be emailed the day before, now it's 1/2 hour before - but we get around 20 or so poeple consistently at the chats and occasionally a few less. The ability for a mix of people with different skills to get together and voice there opinions, ideas and vision in an environment where the decision makers are willing to listen further instills the belief that DotNetNuke is a serious contender and the comittment to make it a *CMS Project of choice* sometimes makes for decisions that on the surface make you wonder why, but after listening to the other developers and their way of thinking, I learn more about the hows and whys of the processes in working in a team environment, in an open source voluntary project and keeping common goals to provide the very best open source project.

What I think we will see coming out in the near future are the overnighters, people thinking you can make a quick dollar or two out of dnn, without actually contributing a thing. I hope to be here for quite a few years yet.. make a few dollars, but more than that - really enjoy the abilty to pass on some skills to those who want to learn.

That being said and done, it's time for me to do some more work on my site and store and get these skins online.  I am feeling much better than this time last week and will now move forward to add the content you've all been waiting for.

Cheers for now.
Nina Meiers