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