Over the last 6 weeks, the DotNetNuke team has been hard at work preparing for our first Beta release of DotNetNuke 6. The DotNetNuke 6 Beta does not include a lot of new functionality but does include significant refinements of the features we had previously highlighted during our CTPs. Even as we were putting the finishing touches on the beta release, the team has been actively out promoting the upcoming launch and demoing DotNetNuke 6 at every opportunity. We have used these opportunities to get feedback from the community and have incorporated some of the suggestions into this release.

For the past 4 years I had the task of working with the speaker selection committee to solicit speakers for the annual DotNetNuke conference. This is a challenging task as we must filter through almost two hundred submissions to find the handful of sessions that will be presented at the conference. With few exceptions the submissions are excellent and we would be lucky to have any of the speakers presenting at the conference. This year was no different. Not only did we get submissions from speakers who have spoken at past conferences, but we also received a number of entries from new speakers as well. In total, we had 177 sessions that we had to whittle down to 27.

DotNetNuke 6 has been a release experience unlike any in the history of DotNetNuke. We have had more packaged releases, more visibility into the code, more discussions with the community and a greater iterative approach to development than at any point in our past.

The community has been able to follow along with us as we progressed from the early UI concepts to a much more polished and refined look. If you were really adventurous, you could watch this transition on almost a daily basis as we kept up a steady stream of code updates on CodePlex. Because we intentionally moved to a longer release cycle, we have been able to go through many iterations, getting community feedback all along the way. With each release our community has told us what they liked, and what they didn’t. After each CTP we have been able to incorporate some of the feedback to help arrive at a much better product. As a result we have been able to progress to what we think is a much more contemporary look, even while taking into account the needs and desires of the overall community. This is just not something that was possible when we were operating under shorter release cycles.

Today marks a major milestone as I once again move my personal blog back to the DotNetNuke Blog.  Four years ago I switched to BlogEngine.Net. There were a number of reasons for doing that, but in the ensuing four years, my reasons for moving off of DotNetNuke as a blogging platform have been mostly resolved.  Where there are still deficiencies in the platform, I am able to contribute to filling those holes and in fact I have been actively working with the blog team for the last year doing just that.

So as of today, you will see me running DotNetNuke for all of my primary blogging needs.  I’ll still have some mini-blogs over on Posterous but those are mostly just a replacement for using Twitpic.

...