Benefactor Program

Slashdotted

In October 2005, I wrote a blog titled "No Respect for Windows Open Source." The blog was a political rant based on the fact that because DotNetNuke did not run on a fully open source stack of software components (that is, Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP or LAMP), it did not get any respect from the general open source community. Further, it argued that all open source projects regardless of platform should be judged solely on the validity of their open source license and ideals. The blog was picked up by Slashdot, the largest independent news site for information technology, and resulted in a lot of exposure for the project (see Figure 1-13). The posting on Slashdot generated more than 500 comments, each with their unique perspective on the Windows open source paradigm.

Figure 1-13

In October, we were approached by .NET Developers Journal (.NETDJ) to do a series of articles on the DotNetNuke project. This was an excellent opportunity to showcase various aspects of the project in a mainstream magazine. A number of Core Team members were identified as potential authors and the first article in a series of six was published in the November edition of .NETDJ. Forging relationships with publishers is a great way to raise the profile of the project and open doors for future opportunities. In this case, working with SYS-CON (the publisher of .NETDJ) reaped rewards in terms of being approved as a featured speaker in the upcoming SYS-CON Enterprise Open Source conference in June 2006.

By the end of 2005, the dotnetnuke.com web site had achieved an impressive Alexa ranking of 6,741 and our SourceForge.Net ranking had climbed to #75 (out of all the open source projects in the world). We were consistently getting 15,000 new registered users per month and our project downloads averaged 120,000 per month. The dotnetnuke.com site was now serving 4.5 million page views per month, and every indication was pointing to even more improvement in 2006.