@Westa,

We release an early version of the software, even knowing it has bugs and UI rendering issues, because there are other aspects of the release which are worth getting feedback on.  That is why I publish a blog specifically calling out areas where we want feedback and those areas where we are still working.

 

This reminds me very much of taking a walk through of a house that is under construction.  The framing is complete, the roof is on and we have started to hang the drywall.  There is still more drywall left to hang, a lot of painting to complete, and tons of finish work remaining.  I personally like walking through the house before it is finished.  I don't beat up the contractor for letting me see his unfinished work.  Instead I thank him for giving me the opportunity to provide feedback while it is still relatively inexpensive to make changes.



This is the phase when module developers and skinners can start playing with the platform to ensure their extensions will continue to work.  This is also the point at which people can provide much needed feedback about specific feature implementations to ensure the feature works as expected.

---

Joe Brinkman
DNN Corp.

Wes,

  The concern is definitely warranted if this was a Beta and we were saying we were almost done.  We have quite a ways to go yet and I know just from watching this internally that the UI comes together very quickly once we get the HTML framework in place.  We started with a few key pages/controls and got them pretty much complete (with maybe 1 or 2 minor rendering issues).  This means that we had the HTML and CSS in place and everything rendering as we expected.  Once that pattern was complete, we moved forward with pushing the html changes through the rest of the app.  CTP 3 has some of that HTML work complete, and some which is not.  Even once the HTML is changed, we then have to go control by control and make sure the CSS is updated to reflect the new structure (think of this as painting the room).  This is a pretty labor intensive process and therefore has spanned a couple of release milestones.



At this point we just completed converting the final controls this weekend to the new HTML structure and will now spend a couple of weeks getting the CSS completed. 



As for the core modules, there is no way in the timeframe we had for 6.0 to get those 100% up to date on the new UI.  In order to take advantage of the new UI, a module would have to take a hard dependency on 6.0 which very few modules can afford to do at this point.  What I can say is that almost every module will be updated in this cycle so that we don't have modules which haven't been updated in over 2 years.  We are working with the team leads to get this completed in time for the 6.0 release.  This will at least allow people who are running a recent version of DotNetNuke to get updated modules.  We'll push this fall to get modules to go through and start updating to the new UI, recognizing that these are community volunteers doing the work.

---

Joe Brinkman
DNN Corp.