So a year or so ago I set out to make a framework that I could easily build upon to make a functional website.  Sure enough, as it sits now, I have a baseline portal system that pretty much could become any website with any type of look and feel.  Then Bill Pierce started commenting on how well put together Dot Net Nuke is.  He then went on to say how I had pretty much reverse engineered what they had.  After taking a look, it seems that both the DNN project and I have much of the same goals...go figure.

I've heard about and played around with DNN before.  It just didn't float my boat.  I didn't like the level of control that you could have over your page.  I have certain design standards that I like to adhere to and they blatently threw them in there.  The result: a bunch of mis-mashed amatuerish looking web pages.  Sure there were a few that were well put together, but hey, I could build it twice as fast through my own framework.

Now that DNN 3.0 beta has come out, I'm really considering switching.  They're just ahead of the game on this one because features that I want to implement, they already have.  There are still certain issues that I have with it, but they decided to use the Provider pattern to map out their framework (also something mine doesn't have - mainly because I'm set on what I'm developing on, and who I'm developing it for) which I've heard ASP.NET 2.0 is going to be using as well.  What's this mean?

I could easily insert my own classes to provide the level of funcationality that I'm looking for.  It seems that they really have done their homework in creating something that would be a viable framework for someone like me to build upon.  In fact, I'm dreaming here, but I could probably create my own provider that they could include in their framework for the future if they wanted to do something a bit differently (like Pane security - instead of reading from a database, I set the AllowedRoles [something which is given to each custom control I build] programmatically in my own framework).

I'm still hesitent.  I mean, I know my own framework forwards and backwards.  It will take a bit to get used to, but it seems like it might be worth it.