Happy Valentines Day!

In case you were wondering, the enhancements to DotNetNuke 2.0 are not simply focussed on one specific application area but rather provide benefit to a wide range of community stakeholders:

Administrators - portal administrators benefit from an improved, cleaner admin interface. Modules now have an "action" menu which provides access to all module related features. Administrators can add new admin modules and tabs to their portal. The integrated Recycle Bin prevents accidental loss of data. New portal settings allow you more control over the management of administrative tabs.

Hosts - a robust Exception handling system allows the host to monitor application errors complete with rich metadata. There is also a Private Assembly Validator to ensure the PA modules your install conform to the XML schema. In addition, the template capability for creating new portals has been expanded to expose more tab and module properties - allowing you to create elaborate portal templates for your clients.

IT Managers - caching has been implemented in a variety of high traffic areas to improve the application performance and reduce network chatter. The re-architecture of the data access layer also provides options for alternate lower cost database storage.

Developers - there are too many items to list in this area but it is safe to say that the majority of the limitations of creating custom modules for the framework have been addressed in this release. I will be writing a series of technical articles in the coming weeks to describe some of the more powerful enhancements. I also encourage you to read some of the documents located in the /Documentation folder and review the /DesktopModules/Survey module for a good working example of Private Assembly development in DNN 2.0.

Designers - the new presentation layer allows web designers to create rich HTML user interfaces which are completely abstracted from the ASP.NET framework. And you are no longer bound to a static layout for your site - your imagination is the limit with the free-form skinning capability.

Business - new features have been added to assist in search engine optimization. In addition, a new feature has been added which allows you to manage your affiliate relationships with your partners ( clicks and acquisitions ). Banner advertising has been improved as well to use a rotating scheme rather than the previous pseudo-random model.