By UnitedVision on

Hi Everybody.

This topic is about my research into CMS systems and the differences between drupal & dotnetnuke.
I was recently hired by a very big corporation to work on a social community for the company.
My main expertise is in PHP development & community development/marketing. But I can do asp.net & java as well.
The past few years I have been doing Joomla development, however I have recently turned from the dark side to drupal.
Since I was hired I was required to do research at my job for the best available framework system for the site I am building.
The company I work for is a Microsoft shop. Their current website, intranet and everything company side is ASP.net.
Luckily for me I was hired to come in and work on a project that NOBODY else had been doing, so I get to choose what I want to do.
However, I still need to prove the higher ups that I know what I am doing and that I am making the best decision for the site.

Over the past 2 weeks I have spent hours upon hours going over comparisons of all the best CMS systems.
Even though I am a PHP guy by choice, I had to give the company all available options....
If I was to use a CMS built in ASP.NET it would make things easier since the company is a MS shop.
Even though i am the only developer on my project, the other guys are all ASP guys so I could get some help on the side.
So I took a gander at DotNetNuke and I found a bunch of things I thought might be interesting for others to see...

1. Drupal Code is awesome. 100% compliant HTML for almost every site I tested with www.w3schools.com
DotNetNuke not so awesome... Most sites I found had hundreds of errors. One site I found had 1054 errors......

2. Drupal is real open source. You can access the code for the framework. Not a hard concept. Spectacular Community effort.
DotNetNuke is fake open source. Its not even close to transparent development. Core code is controlled by the DNN corp.

3. Drupal has outstanding documentation. So far I have found updated info on everything you want to know about Drupal & modules.
DotNetNuke has horrible documentation. So much so that they have released 2 versions but still have docs from 4 versions ago....

4. Drupal is on top of bugs & fixes. I see bugs & fixes on the site and I see people actively trying to solve these problems for all...
DotNetNuke still has bugs that are from 3 years ago online.... the fix is posted online.... but DNN corp does nothing to include it...

5. Drupal has free modules & plugins. Nuff said.
DotNetNuke has OK features included, but nothing great. All other modules you have to buy.

6. Drupal module developers update their stuff routinely and seem extremely active on trying to help others with support.
DotNetNuke modules either the code sucks and you just wasted money on a mod or you cant touch the code for it.

7. Drupal is advancing. The idea of Drupal as a Social Publishing System & framework is really starting to pay off.
DotNetNuke says they are developing stuff, but I can find lots of posts that says otherwise.... see this blog here...

8. Drupal has NASA. http://www.nasa.gov/ Checking their HTML validation: 2 Errors, 1 warning(s)
DotNetNuke has Microsoft. This is a site showcase: http://www.musicalcarioca.com.br/musicalcarioca/ 228 Errors, 141 warning(s)

9. Drupal actually appreciates its developers. In all my searches I have not seen anything negative about the drupal community.
In my searches on DOTNETNUKE I ran into this blog post from an established developer in dotnetnuke

10. Drupal is more popular. Taken right from google with an index rating of drupal 1.00
DotNetNuke is still just getting there. From google with an index rating of 0.28

If anybody else ever has to run into a similar situation for making a choice like this.... it is apparent what that choice should be.

If you have an option... Go drupal. Plus it runs on WAMP (Windows, Apache, MYSQL, PHP) without a problem.

The only thing I can find positive about dotnetnuke is that its written in ASP.NET so if you HAVE TO hAVE MSOFT... its ur choice.

Keep it up drupal. You have my vote.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x