So I've been fooling around with DNN for a few days now. Overall I'm very impressed with the product. Like anything else, it has its limitations, but at least I can change things if I need to which I wouldn't have with a lot of other products.
However, one of the things that I've found troubling is the lack of documentation. I'm depending on the events module very heavily and there is no documentation that I can find that explains how to use the module. I poked around with the module settings enough to find what I wanted, but it would be nice if there was information on using it, especially since I'll be responsible for training people how to use it.
The other thing that I've had issues with is the Blog module. Blogs are bound to the user who created them and by default, a page with the blog modules on it will display any blog on the portal. It would be nice to be able to create a blog and tie it to a user, not just the person who created it. I may not necessarily want a person to be able to add modules to a page, so how do I create their blog? How do I tie a specific blog to a page? Well, I figured out a way to take care of this:
Creating a user specific blog without logging in as them
Although this is not the nicest way to handle the problem and requires you to go through the database, it still works. Just change the UserID to the ID of the login it should be associated with (Get this from the Users table).
Setting up a Personal Blog page
If you want to create a page that only shows one blog, go into the Module Options on the blog item list. Then change the value of "Personal Blog Page". This will set up the blogging module to only display that specific blog.
Now even though I am complaining a bit, I do realize that the people who work on this project aren't getting paid to do it. The fact that the modules have all of the features that I've looked for so far is incredible. I just hope they'll concentrate more on documentation a bit down the road.
Technorati : DotNetNuke