I was looking for a quick and easy way to set up a community site.  Of course I wanted it to be .Net.  Why? Because I was going to have to support it and if that involves code changes well I am much more proficient in ASP.Net than PHP!  So I was looking for a Portal that would support a Forum and possibly a Blog.  This turned out to be a big issue!  I could of course have used Sharepoint. In hind site it might have been easier!  But there are no open source or free solutions that I found for integrating a Forum or Blog.  I also thought of using the ASP.Net Portal Starter Kit, but then I found Dot Net Nuke!  I really liked the community around it and the modules that were already exiting solved a lot of my issues.  I also liked how easy it is to administer and change the skin of the site. 

I then started a search for an ASP.Net Forum.  The one used by www.asp.net and xbox looked great.  This is how I found out that Rob Howard had left Microsoft.  You can take a look at http://www.telligentsystems.com/Solutions/ and see that they have productized the forum as Community Server :: Forums, .Text blogging engine as Community Server :: Blogs and Ngallery as Community Server :: Gallery.  Although I really respect Rob and the work he has done I decided not to go with their products.  Partly because I have always like dasBlog better than .Text but that is only because dasBlog came out first and I learned it.  Telligent Systems has just announced that they are providing a Community Server :: NNTP add on to their Forum product.  This is awesome!  All they need now is a WIKI module.  There is no documentation on how to add these Telligent System modules into DNN. 

That led me to use Yet Another Forum.net and forgo the blog although it looks like you can easily integrate dasBlog and .Text into DotNetNuke. 

I found that there are pretty easy instructions on how to integrate YAFF into DotNetNuke.  And that seemed to be enough for me for now.  I also left off the WIKI because I feel that people will abuse it.

Now I want to check out Rainbow Project portal and compare it to DNN.  Paul Wilson (yes the WilsonORMapper guy) asks why DNN?  I think DNN is a great platform to develop a simple website, community site, IT website or product that needs to track users on a very simple basis and is easy to maintain.

Now I am finding that DNN might not be so easy to host.  I am trying to work with a reasonably priced Host to get DNN up and running.  It shouldn’t be too hard with having both the forum and the portal data in Sql.  Maybe I should have used Sharepoint.  The problem there is then I have to be worried about where to store the users and what users can go where in the site is much harder.  I could use just about any ASP.Net product in an IFrame I suppose but that would require custom coding to check for permissions and again not something I wanted to do for a simple project.