Are you evaluating a CMS to use for a new website in 2020? Here are 8 reasons why DNN Platform is a perfect choice.
1. 100% Free and Open Source
Previously DNN Platform was the free and open-source offering of DNN Corp, as opposed to their premium CMS, Evoq. In 2018, DNN became part of the .NET Foundation which essentially means that any changes in DNN Corp will no longer affect the DNN Community. So you can rest assured that DNN Platform is and will always be free and open source.
2. Easy to Use
One of the best features of DNN is that it's extremely easy to use. DNN allows you to quickly create web pages using its 100% frontend editing capability. If you've worked with other CMSs like WordPress, Joomla or Umbraco, you'll recall how you edit content in a backend dashboard, followed by clicking another button to view the modified page. DNN harmonizes content editing and viewing, making it easy for non-techies to easily put content on their website.
DNN harmonizes content editing and viewing, making it easy for non-techies to easily put content on their website.
3. Great Developer Experience
For developers familiar with .NET development, DNN is quick to get started with. Out of the box it supports WebForms, Model-View-Controller (MVC) and Single Page Applications (SPA) modules. DNN exposes many convenient APIs for developers to use when building new functionality. The development stack is unopinionated, meaning that developers have full freedom to use any third-party vendors and libraries to achieve what they want to.
For example, when building SPA modules, you can use React, Vue, Angular, Svelte or just about any other JS library, without having to worry about whether DNN "allows" it. The same way, you can import and use as many .NET libraries (NuGet packages) as needed. If you're looking to get started with DNN development, there are many starter module templates available on the DNN Community GitHub.
4. Easy for Designers
Are you only familiar with basic HTML / CSS and some JavaScript? Not to worry, as designers and frontend developers can create themes for DNN with little effort and no visual limitations. This means you can 100% customise the look of your DNN website. This is great evidence of DNN's versatility, especially if you were to compare it to WordPress where 90% of all website themes look similar.
5. Versatile and Offers Unlimited Extensibility
DNN Platform, appropriately named, is more than just a content management system. Over the past 10 years, I've built various applications using DNN, including job portals, real estate websites, intranet applications, asset management systems, mobile app backends and automotive sales websites, e-commerce websites and more. Whatever you’re building, you could probably build it with DNN.
6. Extremely Secure
Security has always been a top priority for the DNN Community. DNN has a built-in security analyzer, which audits your site for vulnerabilities, incorrect configurations and permissions for both the filesystem and the database. Each item shows a PASS / ALERT / CHECK / FAIL result, making it easy to secure your DNN site. Note however that the best way to keep your DNN site secure is to always update your website to the latest version of DNN.
7. Getting Closer to .NET 5 (.NET Core)
While it’s not quite there yet, the DNN Community is working hard to bring DNN Platform closer to .NET Core. Over the past few months, DNN Platform has added support for one of the most significant features of .NET Core, that is Dependency Injection (DI). This promotes software development best practices such as loosely coupled architecture, something that DNN was not particularly good at previously.
Other than DI, the DNN community is working on adding Razor Pages support in DNN, to further modernise it. Trust me when I say DNN is by no means outdated.
8. The DNN Community
With a brand new website launched in late 2019, the DNN Community is more active than ever before. There are online meetups every few weeks that you can join to learn more about DNN or to stay up-to-date with the latest developments. You could also attend the yearly conferences, DNN Connect (Europe) / DNN Summit (USA), to meet with like-minded DNN fanatics.
Most importantly, the DNN Community is always there to support you. If you have any questions or need any help with anything DNN related, you can use the forums to get an answer. You can also read the docs at dnndocs.com to check out the tutorials and guides for yourself.
This article is cross-posted on the DNN Community website.
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