DNN Steering Committee

Last Friday, we (Joe Brinkman, Bob Kruger, Will Morgenweck, Peter Donker and myself, Ernst Peter Tamminga) had the first meeting of the DNN Steering Committee. This committee will provide guidance for the DNN community and DNN Platform. The formation of the steering committee is the result of the reorganisation of the community approach of DNN in August of this year. If you want to get some of the details behind this new attitude, I suggest to read the blog written by Joe Brinkman, which you can find here.

This first meeting was primarily used to discuss and set the items and activities for the committee for the upcoming year. Since we want to be open and transparant, I want to provide some feedback on the things we have been talking about: MVP program and DNN Platform roadmap.

MVP Program

The DNN MVP (Most Valuable Person) is in place for almost 2 years. Time to evaluate. The current program serves a purpose: setting the spotlight on individuals who made themselves valuable for DNN, the community, support, evangelism, training, presentations, introductions and more. MVP's are nominated by the community and choosen by the community. You can earn a MVP status for a year, based upon the contributions in the year before that. 

The MVP program worked for the last 2 years, but we concluded that the group of curernt MVP's functions as a sort of core team and that was not the intention for having MVP's. We also evaluated that the refresh rate (new people, new potential MVP's) could profit from a different (more open) setup and procedure. While we have not finalized this in the first meeting, we aim to have a modified MVP program in place at the end of this year.

DNN Platform is ready for a renovation?

I regularly read books from managent guru's and one of them is Peter Drucker. In the last century, he contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of the modern business corporation. One of his key ideas is planned abandonment, to counteract the tendency for people to cling to yesterdays success. This idea can be put in a one sentence advise;  “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.”

In the past years, DNN Platform has been enhanced tremendously. If you want to get an idea, just take some time to review the changes since DNN version 5 in 2010 and the current version 7: it is a big difference. That does not mean that nothing is left to be improved. Some of the technology used is based on the basic ASP.net technology of 2004-2005, especially ASP.net webforms. Although a form of MVC type development has been implemented in DNN, as well as the more modern webAPI, the basics are still proven webforms. In addition to this, DNN has been very, very strong for the possibility to upgrade to new versions (and I assume DNN will do so in the future). But this upgradability is a burden for serious and drastic innovation at the same time.

The world is changing, and Microsoft technology is evolving as well. Time for DNN Platform to do again a step into the forefront of information technology. This is not completely new for DNN. In the past year, investigations by DNN have been started into the next generation of DNN, e.g. see blogs written by the head of the Architecture team Charles Nurse: Using MVC for developing modules and Maverick Update among others.

These investigations do not mean that the improvement current version of DNN will stop, in the contrary. You can be sure that DNN Platform will be enhanced with serious incremental releases in the upcoming months (version 7.4, 7.5 and even more). This is clearly illustrated by the roadmap for DNN Platform that can be found here. But at some point in the next year, a serious new version of DNN will become available.

DNN neXt

We have choosen DNN neXt as a working title for the next generation of DNN. Parallel with new releases of DNN 7, we (and we include all of you as well) will start working on DNN neXt: cutting edge IT for web content management and web application framework. The details are still to be defined, but I am very positive that we will set a standard for the most innovative and productive open source CMS around.

Stay tuned, or better: stay connected and contribute!