You know when there's some movement and things have been resolved when the word comes out to get push and get more things finished.  So the focus has been on sorting out Gemini. Great to see that now we have quite alot of activity, it's time to create the strategies to maintain it and keep it updated.  Scott has posted in the core team forum some approaches we can take so I think in the next week or two, some structure will fall into place.  Gemini was the new bug tracking application to replace one called Aardvark, but for now, we're finding it's been a learning curve, learning the application and how it works, there were some shortcomings in Gemini and it's been updated and tweaked a few times  now since DotNetNuke gets so much activity.

As the time approaches for the release candidate, the emphasis has been on bug testing but of course, never enough testing because it's software by nature, and I don't know of many applications that are tested enough...ever, no matter how good they are.

There has been a huge amount of work put in by some of the core team developers and non core team members who are helping out by testing and it's been greatly appreciated and I'm looking foward to a time where we can all look back and see how much work has gone into this build.

I thought for a while, and I think many others have too, that perhaps 3 was too big a task, maybe not worth all the headaches we've gone through, but as I do more of the testing, start trying out some of the modules that are coming out, seeing how they work, I'm in love again.  Maybe it was a few extra hours of sleep too, who knows, or even the fact I got my site launched, if not perfect, its a start.

For those who are coming into DNN and see nothing but betas, all I can say is be patient, this is like something you've not seen before when it comes to true online management of your business and you won't be disappointed.  For the core team members who have had to weather the storm of an overdue project, things taking longer to rectify, they too must be getting some sleep and getting excited again.  It's like that final push to get something out the door and just before you get there, you're pretty tired and shitty, but just this last week, as I've been helping a couple of other core team members on elements of work, I'm so appreciative of what they've been doing.

One of the very smart things I noticed about the host settings was the overall snapshot in the host settings, have you looked at it? it's just so cool.  Gives you an overview of the server, IP, db connection. Now, you don't have to hope sql or the web.config file to see what the name of the db is.

I will try my best to get a newsletter out this week, as I'm doing lots of writing and give a summary of what's been happening over the last month.  DotNetNuke will be out when it's ready. I'm still launching projects in 2.1.2, but do confess, for the simple, non busy sites I've been asked to do, I'm telling clients - what do you want - trying a 3.10 beta, only beta, or a 2.1.2 installation, and let them make the decision. They know the risks, but keen to give it a try.

Not much more to report - spent most of the day working on a car site and some files for another core team member - with his skin - converted fully to css and now, you won't believe it, only two small issues - one being - it looks better in Mozilla - I don't get that - that's not supposed to happen.

Have been studying some of the menu functions and hope to have some menu solutions for a couple of jobs I've done that are experiencing not as good menu rendering in mozilla as I would like.  It stops me somteimes from being as creative, but what can I do? I can't bear to see so many of the dnn sites that look fantastic in IE and just awful in Mozilla, not just a bit awful, but really unacceptable in my opinion, so I'm sorry - I'll steer clear from designs that don't hold in Mozilla.

Working on the skins doc, more I read, the less I realise I know about DNN and I've been a full time student for over a year now.

Oh, for those who have the Snapsis Tool, I'm going to be writing up a review on it, I've not really promoted it as much as I'd liked to - it's been on my site, but never to the extent I'd like to have it shown. I'm converting all my skins to be Snapsis compatible too.  I've been getting some enquiry for skin updates from people who are running the Snapsis engine, and, I'm noticing the big jump from DNN1 to DNN3 - seems like DNN1 users can't hold back any longer.. they just want DNN3 like everyone else.

Catch you soon.. Keep on at it!

Nina Meiers