Almost every time I talk to someone new about DotNetNuke or am introduced to someone I am asked "Why DotNetNuke?" or some similar question to that. Now depending on when I'm asked my answer might vary a little bit but there is really a pretty common trend in my reply and it is a multi-part answer. To explain I'll give a little bit of a back story on how I got introduced to the community.
Back in mid-2006 I was looking for a platform of sorts to put up a personal blog (
http://www.mitchelsellers.com). I was a .NET developer by day and wanted something that I could work with and eventually expand upon but I really wanted something quick and easy to setup as I was just starting. I had no idea at that time how popular my blog might be, or if it would even go anywhere. I stumbled upon DotNetNuke after doing a little searching and instantly though of how helpful this might actually be, and in September with the help of DotNetNuke my site was up and running. At first I just put the site together and wrote some articles and didn't mess with it much. In late 2006 i was looking at moving to a different company and found out they were using DotNetNuke as a basis for an enterprise reporting application and after getting that position I spring head-first into the community.
It was in early 2007 that I transitioned from seeing DotNetNuke as a "utility" to seeing it as something that truly offered value that I could build upon. Getting in with my new position I started visiting the forums here on DotNetNuke.com quite heavily and was overly impressed by the community. I had a lot of really 'stupid' questions if you will as I started down this process of building and maintaining my first enterprise application using DotNetNuke. However, every time my questions were greeted with friendly, timely responses from the community. It was this community passion that truly had me hooked.
So the true answer about why I use DotNetNuke is two parts. First DotNetNuke as a product, I truly believe is the "Leading open source web content management platform for ASP.NET" as it is outlined on the homepage here. It serves as a great foundation for building applications of all shapes and sizes. In my time since starting with DotNetNuke i have developed over 350 custom modules/providers/extensions and worked on more sites/projects than I can count. Not once has it failed to be able to meet our needs. However, the second part, which is a key to why I contribute to DotNetNuke so freely is the community. The fact that we have a world-wide community of users, administrators, and developers using the platform that are constantly volunteering to help others starting out with the platform is overly impressive. To me it is a sign that DotNetNuke is a product that one can really get behind.
So there it is, that is why I use DotNetNuke!