Ok, I confess.. DotNetNuke is now becoming a pain in the butt to manage...
That's my official statment - based on a couple of incidents and a conversation
with a colleague developer, who, although an intelligent human, was unable after
22 hours to get his site running, going, looking like it was going or even close
to it.
All he was doing was setting up a local build to view some of the change
since his sites are running on 3.1.1 and I think I may have given the impression
that I'd rather eat broken glass than do an upgrade.
Why oh Why has it become so hard?
After talking with my friend about how he use the VSI and project and keeps
coming up with a consistent error and finding screen shots of information that's
depicting DNN 3, he told me how he creates sites, and I asked him if he was
writing any modules, he's a C# windows app guy and so I thought maybe he was
going to get into writing some modules, but he told me no, he just wanted to
have a look around and didn't know any other way to get DNN going. That's how
developers do it.. they use the StarterKit build and create a project and then
it's supposed to work, but it didn't...Then he found out he has to download
something else to create the db using Visual Studio Developer, it just sort of
went pear shaped, and he spent hours on the forums going in circles, and so many
unanswered posts, but I think there is an element of frustration that could have
perhaps missed some answers - I don't know. But all I can see is I felt for
him, and the many many others who just want to get DNN working. It doesn't take
me long - maybe - 5 - 10 minutes to get a site going.. but I don't use the
starter kit.. I use the install.zip file.
So he asked me how I do it and I said - well, I unzip the 'install.zip'
folder into a folder, set the security permissions, set the web.config, create
the db, set the aspnet user in the db and use the 'trusted_connection' method
for local testing and building. However, if I'm going to be deploying it - I
have another setting which I put into the connection string and leave commented
out. In fact, since I'm still using sql 2000 on my local server, I completely
delete the strings I don't want as I find them confusing to say the least.
I listened to the frustrations that my friend had and I genuinely felt
bad.... felt bad about the fact it shouldn't be that hard, and then he said he'd
give my way a try, and a few hours passed and I got another call, as he stepped
me through the process.. and I found out - he hadn't created the db.. apparently
it's sort of handled differently using Visual Studio or Visual Studio express,
and so now I'm doing a video on the process.. which lead me to having to get
more software on my dev machine, AND the head set and microphone, since they are
on the other machine... It's enough to frustrate the hell out of any person.
You know you can do an install using the 'upgrade' build - and manually add
the modules you want. I think that's cool and it's a much 'faster' way to deploy
a site live too. I'm going to do a video on that as well. I mean if I can get
dnn running, anyone should be, but after speaking to my friend on the weekend, I
realised how much struggle so many people have and I'm sorry about. It shouldn't
be that way.
Anyway - then I thought OK I have my 4.4.0 build of DNN, and my 5.1.0 build
of catalook, I'm set... let me get my ecommerce sites finished, and from there
it just went from bad to worse. I managed to bring my whole server to a
grinding halt and looking at the 'performance' it was set to disk by default,
and it consistently came up with timing out, too many connections, errors I've
never seen before. I wasn't game to upgrade to DNN 4.4.1 after reading other
problems about the build and performance and compression. I commented out the
compression details in the web.config which also helped.
I appreciate there have been quite a few enhancements, but there are also
things done now that I feel shouldn't be.. firstly - compression on by default
and setting the performance from memory to disk without making it obvious that
it's been done makes me wonder what else is being done to the install without me
knowing. Nothing sinister, just mainly performance wise - setting some things to
default which particularly if you are hosting dnn, you would like to have better
information about, since the way I run my build should remain in my hands, not
the whim of an upgrade.
So today has been pearshaped to say the least.. I thought I had done some
testing locally but not enough.. but in spite of it all, I think it's heading in
the right direction. I will have a new XD site coming up in the next month and
it's going to be a rocket .. that's for sure as we squeeze all the bloat out of
it.
An unsettling Monday, but looking forward to nutting out these things with
the build and catalook store.. and this time I've created a few small videos on
how I'm setting up a store using DNN and Catalook - I will make them available
when they are completed.
That's it for now..
Cheers
Nina