Skip to main content

Freestyle Entrepreneur Outgrows TypePad...DotNetNuke Here we Come

In my spare time, I operate a small business / entrepreneur blog called The Freestyle Entrepreneur (affectionately known as TFE) with my cousin. We started it about 6 months ago to help entrepreneurs and to try and make a profit. I'm handling the technology, the marketing, and a bit of the content. Other than this personal blog on Blogger, TFE was my first foray into serious blogging.

After much investigation, I placed us on TypePad using their top-tier offering. It's a very reasonable $15/month given the value of what TypePad (or SixApart...also makers of Moveable Type) provides. To be clear, TFE isn't really outgrowing TypePad, we've outgrown blogging.

This isn't to say, "Pfffft, blogging? We mastered that in 6 months! Whatever!". Quite the contrary. We've refined our approach and identified blogging is just one piece of what we're about. We're taking a more holistic approach with a more newspaper/portal feel with blogging assuming just one piece of our offering.

With this new goal/approach in mind, the technology department (me), set off to find a new, more appropriate platform. After much research, I've decided on DotNetNuke 4.5 (just released) with a SQL Server Express 2005 backend and a stock template presentation. My criteria focused around:
  • Clean, easy to navigate, easy to administer/maintain
  • Comfortable, mainstream technology with a large developer community
  • Readily available, reasonably-priced hosting
  • Broad functionality and flexibility
Given this criteria, I narrowed it down to OpenPHPNuke, Joomla, Mambo, Moveable Type, and DotNetNuke. All met my criteria with Moveable Type bringing up the rear (no cut to MT but it's really more of a blogging tool than a portal/CMS platform and it takes a good deal of tweaking to make it do CMS).

The site CMS Matrix won me over to DotNetNuke. Someone put serious effort into this site. It's excellent! One can choose from dozens of CMS platforms and compare them side-by-side against dozens of features. Seeing a "Yes" next to almost all features for DotNetNuke won me over. Additionally, I've been using the .Net platform since before Beta 2 of version 1.0 (2000).

This isn't to say we're dumping TypePad either. Their blogging tool works great and we may just keep the blog there but build up a bigger site around it. Not sure yet.

I'll post soon with background on setting up the platform and our progress...

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TFS Reports Out of Date

You may have noticed it takes a while for Team Foundation Server (TFS) reports to reflect changes you've made to work items or builds. Let me guess...about an hour, right? Out of the box, TFS is set to refresh the data warehouse from its transactional store every 60 minutes. How do I change the frequency of the data warehouse refresh? Browse to the TFS Controller Web Service on your TFS application tier server within IE at: http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx Select the ChangeSetting option Enter RunIntervalSeconds for the settingId and the desired number of seconds for newValue (300 for 5 minutes...5*60) Select Invoke How do I force a data warehouse refresh? Two methods here: either via the above web service or using SQL Server Management Studio. Via the web service: Browse to the TFS Controller Web Service within IE at: http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx Select the Run option Click Invo...
6 comments
Read more

Rollback a Ooops in TFS with TFPT Rollback

Rhut roe, Raggie. You just checked in a merge operation affecting 100's of files in TFS against the wrong branch. Ooops. Well, you can simply roll it back, right? Select the folder in Source Control Explorer and...hey, where's the Rollback? Rollback isn't supported in TFS natively. However, it is supported within the Power Tools leveraging the command-line TFPT.exe utility. It's fairly straightforward to revert back to a previous version--with one caveot. First, download and install the Team Foundation Power Tools 2008 on your workstation. Before proceeding, let's create a workspace dedicated to the rollback. To "true up" the workspace, the rollback operation will peform a Get Latest for every file in your current workspace. This can consume hours (and many GB) with a broad workspace mapping. To work around this, I create a temporary workspace targeted at just the area of source I need to roll back. So let's drill down on our scenario... I'm worki...
10 comments
Read more

Certified or Certifiable?

As a senior technology professional, I interview a lot of candidates. I also maintain solid relationships with other folks in the community. Frequently, the topic of certifications arises: A good investment? Valuable? A clear measurement of skill? Consensus appears to draw the line related to one's seniority. If you're (for example) just out of school and looking for an instant creditability boost, by all means pursue a certification. Likely, this credential will assist you in overcoming the "junior" tag and likely land you more interviews and client roles. (Note: I'm going to use the terms senior and junior here...no offense to either. Can't think of a better one word description. I was a junior once too.) In stark contrast, the value of certifications drops off the table around the 2-3 year mark. Some in my circles even perceive certifications as a negative for the senior professional. They think, "If this guy is so solid, why is he wasting valuable...
5 comments
Read more