Last week we had an interesting meeting with everybody and discussed the future of our team and how we can help making things happen here on the DotNetNuke platform. One of the challenges we are currently facing is that we have a good amount of core team members and volunteers who can do the work and roll out some cool enhancements but we don’t quite have any influence on the DotNetNuke CE releases.
For example, we can completely revamp the installation wizard and make it a lot more user friendly than it currently is. But it isn’t easy for us to just include that in the DotNetNuke CE release without going through the proper release schedule determined by framework leaders and engineering team since we don’t know what they are currently working on. And to get on their schedule and request a meeting to talk about things with them isn't quite an easy thing to do.
However, Jenni Merrifield, who was hired by the DNN Corp. to work as an UX developer, plays an important role in our Experience team. Working with Jenni is a great advantage to the team because she can inform us with what she’s currently working on. The Experience team can actually line up our work items and get them done to align with the effort of the engineering team at DNN Corp. That way the changes we make can be included in the DotNetNuke CE at the time of release.
This sounds a lot easier than how it actually works. To have the changes incorporated with the core releases isn’t easy at all. We have to give a convincing reason on why a certain item should be addressed and when it should happen. Then we would have to allocate resources and find the right talents who are experts in it so we can do it right the first time. Just to be clear that the DotNetNuke Experience team are not responsible for driving where the framework should be, but we are responsible for suggesting changes to ‘enhance’ the experience of the end users. Then the decisions will be made according to the leaders of the framework. There are many factors influence the decision on a change should be made to the existing core functionality within the framework. Anyway, I won’t go into so much detail since there are many ‘enhancements’ people would love to see it happen in DotNetNuke. But I’d like to inform you all that we did compile a huge list of things that we want to address.
Right now we are currently and tentatively focusing on DotNetNuke Installation Wizard enhancements, the publishing of DotNetNuke UX Style Guide as Jenni posted here and a few others we have yet to make decision on until our meeting next week.
So if you have any suggestions on how to improve the experience of DotNetNuke CE, please feel free to send me an email and I’ll bring it to the team attention (if they haven’t already in our list) during our regular meetings and we all can discuss the benefits of doing it as well as prioritizing them to align with the release of DotNetNuke CE.
I look forward to working with many people on improving the experience of both newcomers and existing users of DotNetNuke.