DotNetNuke

One of the topics that Scott Guthrie and I discussed in our early conversations was the issue of product branding. IBuySpy Workshop achieved its early goals of providing a public reference to the IBuySpy Portal community. This resulted in an influx of ASP.NET developers who were familiar with the IBuySpy Portal application and were interested in this new open source concept. But as the code bases diverged, there was a need for a new project identity — a unique brand that would differentiate the community and provide the mechanism for building an internationally recognized ecosystem. Research of competing portal applications on other platforms revealed a strong tendency toward the "nuke" slogan.

The "nuke" slogan was originally coined by Francisco Burzi of PHP-Nuke fame (the oft-disputed pioneer of open source portal applications). Over the years, a variety of other projects adopted the slogan as well — so many that the term had obtained industry recognition in the portal-application genre. To my surprise, a WHOIS search revealed that dotnetnuke.com, .net, and .org were not registered and, in my opinion, seemed to be the perfect identity for the project. Again emphasizing the bare-bones resources under which the project was initiated, my credit card transaction to register the three domain names was denied, and I was only able to register dotnetnuke.com (in the long run an embarrassing and contentious issue as the .net and .org domain names were immediately registered by other individuals). Equally as spontaneous, I did an Internet search for images containing the word "nuke" and located a three-dimensional graphic of a circular gear with a nuclear symbol embossed on it. I contacted the owner of the site and was given permission to use the image (it was in fact, simply one of many public domain images they were using for a fictitious storefront demonstration). A new project identity was born — Version 1.0.5 of the IBuySpy Workshop was re-branded as DotNetNuke, which the community immediately abbreviated to DNN for simplicity (see Figure 1-7).

Figure 1-7