News Articles has always been, to me, by far, the greatest module out there that extended the function and use of DotNetNuke. To be honest, it striked me as odd that DotNetNuke never had something such as this in the core, a complex and truly dynamic publishing system with extensibility in feature, function, and templating.

As I've been out of DotNetNuke for quite a while, I wanted to come back in here and let you all know of a far superior content management system to DNN to help others out with the holes that DNN and News Articles perhaps could not have filled. Many of the requests here are for features that I've been seeing across over and over again that, by stock, is already supported, and if not, most modules out there would do the job admirably.

I'd highly recommend anyone to check out a CMS called Expression Engine. It is a commercial content management system, but the way it handles content and themes is so broad, it's really powerful and scaleable towards so many different usages. The way themes work in Expression Engine somewhat reminds me of how DotNetNuke handles it. In fact, I think it steps it up a notch. Furthermore, it also incorporates tagging, just like Scott's excellent modules do as well. Scott, if you're reading this, I'd ask you to take have an objective mindset and take a look at how it handles publishing as well. If it is not revolutionizing publishing, than it definitely is evolving it. Many of the great things I see in it, I hope News Articles can adapt or learn a thing from.

As for why I decided to make this post at Ventrian.. Well, put simply, News Articles did an admirable job at publishing content and EE quite reminded me of it. If DotNetNuke and News Articles is not doing the job for you because you're looking for something more powerful, than this warrants a look into. Many of the requests that I used to have and that I've seen others have with News Articles has been managed admirably with Expression Engine almost out of the box. Oh, and of course, because this community simply rocks.

I don't have much serious complains with DotNetNuke. It's a great open-source CMS, but has some shortcomings I wish never existed. It has served me for quite some time, but it's shortcomings led me to look elsewhere. I've since tried out Drupal, but Expression Engine really takes the cake out of things.

This is nothing to knock on Scott's modules. To be honest, if Scott had never produced the modules that he did, I probably would never have even bothered with DotNetNuke longer than a month. I really love how Scott supports the community and seriously takes into consideration all the feature requests, etc.

Beauty of Expression Engine is that many of these requests are already handled through Expression Engine. If some of you are curious about what I'm talking about, a glimpse at their upcoming 2.0 release is simply astonishing. It really is leagues above anything I've ever tried.. Although I do have to keep an open-mind with Drupal, but the complexity of it just outweighed everything else, being on time constraints.

This post isn't meant to criticize Scott's modules, his service, or anything else. I'm simply publishing this so other Ventrian users and, for that matter, DotNetNuke, can see what else is out there. Expression Engine almost single handedly answered all my requests. That being said, I still have sites running on DNN, and plan on keeping them that way until I settle down with Expression Engine and have more time developing for it.

Scott, I'd love to help you improve News Articles.. I love the way of how it was so expansive and how easy it was to tailor, filter content, etc. Most importantly, how you listened to requests from the community and was on top of bugs was the real asset of a membership here. Expression Engine really reminds me of the foundations of how NA functioned. Which to me, leads me to believe that you can evolve your platform to become even more powerful than before.

If anyone has any questions, comments, or just something they'd like to share, feel free to post here. I really feel like I owe it to this community to help them with their online endevours, because it has helped me out so much. Whether it is through finding a new CMS, or providing Scott with some new inspiration, than I feel like I've done a job.

So Scott, if you're reading this, feel free to drop me a PM or drop a reply here! As always, would love to hear from you. Trust me, what EE has done with publishing can really push your module to that higher echelon.