It also got me wondering how many DotNetNuke users there are out there who don’t see the DNN world through the eyes of the DNN Forums (and miss out a little I think!). There probably is a massive percentage of the 300 000 DotNetNuke.com users who don’t visit the DNN mothership often and use SnowCovered as an interface to the murky world of 3rd party modules, skins, tutorials and other bits of information. While there is a vast amount of useful information on the main DotNetNuke website, I find the sheer size and amount can be quite overwhelming and the amount of information causes the useful nuggets to get lost in the void.
These were the primary reasons behind the creation of The DotNetNuke Directory; A central location with a simple, clean directory index of useful DotNetNuke websites and resources to serve the DotNetNuke community; all for free! Every single submission is reviewed for quality, spell-checked and standardised (to ensure it's not a promotional adverts and all websites are presented equally).
It’s now been up and running for just over 2 months and I’ve had fantastic feedback! A lot of users have thanked me and most of the key DNN community members have listed their websites. There are loads of sites that I didn’t even know existed, and a lot of Showcase sites that have nothing to do with DNN or IT but are built on DNN technology! The latter are great for showing disbelieving clients the power of the skinning engine and how different various sites can look with a bit of creative freedom.
At the time of writing this, the top hit site (DNNHelp) has received almost 400 hits – that’s a lot of traffic! This is fantastic and as my site logs show over 200 unique people are visiting the site per day (with a little help from Google Adwords!). Not only that, but if all goes well and the Google Dance ends, it appears as though Google have judged the site worthy of a 5/10 Page Rank! Considering Smart-Thinker has been around for 5 years (1.5 of those in DNN form!) and it only has a 4/10 PR, this is quite impressive.
If you have not already done so, you can submit your site for free. You do not have to be logged in, but registered users can rate and comment on sites, which improves the quality of the listings and helps provide a better, free service to everyone. Please help by submitting your comments and ratings.
If you use RSS (please do yourself a favour and read up on this if you don’t use it yet!) you can keep up to date as new websites are added to the directory – point your RSS Reader here.
Another feature that is proving to be VERY popular is the Module Search function. This means that module developers can now select the modules they sell/give away and it makes it easy for you as a consumer to find vendors for the type of module you are looking for.
We have also compiled a list of Frequently Asked Questions to help user's find answers to common problems without having to post on the Forums. Here are 3 of the most common questions I have seen (and hence are in the FAQ!)
- When is the next release?
- What is the difference between 3x and 4x
- Where can I post main and project-level bugs and see roadmaps?
- Are there examples of DNN being used for large user communities?
- How many people are using DotNetNuke?
The next step for the DotNetNuke Directory is the “Featured Site” section on the home page. The details are still being worked out, but there are a lot of great sites that are hidden away that will be exposed with this feature. More on this soon…
The DotNetNuke Directory is built with the core Repository module (incredibly flexible and powerful) with a custom template. Which means that as the core module increases in power you will be able to see the new features here – we have raised a few Gemini change requests to improve the usefulness of the Directory.
To end off, hopefully you’ll find the DotNetNuke Directory as useful as we do! Please raise any queries you have about the DotNetNuke Directory in this Forum. Feel free to leave your comments here.