DotNetNuke 6.0: Revamped User Interface, Cloud & SharePoint Integrations

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jul 25, 2011

You knew it was coming, they blogged about it. DotNetNuke (news, site) has announced the official release of DNN 6.0. The first thing that will catch your eye — the new interface.

Revamped User Interface

There are a number of new things coming with DotNetNuke 6.0, the core built in C# is just one of them (and you knew that was going to happen).

Switching to C# for core was a big deal and likely a very smart one for DNN, but it's something you can't see or touch (at least not on the surface). It's the completely redesigned user interface that will probably catch your eye first. And it looks pretty nice.

DNN 6 has a much more modern interface, but it not only looks good, it's also much faster to build and deploy a website using it. With all three editions of DNN (community, professional and enterprise) a site template is shipped with many of the features you would see in a typical website.

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DNN 6.0 - getting started screen

Along with a complete site template, the interface has switched from working on everything within the webpage — and therefore a lot of pain in the butt scrolling — to offering modal windows and pop-up dialogs (like the log in dialog box).

In the screenshot below you see the popup menu for managing a selected component within the webpage. Also notice the Manage button greyed out over other components, so you can easily see what is editable. The mode option in the top right enables you to quickly switch between edit, view and layout.

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DNN 6.0 Actions Menu

There's also a new Pages Administration interface that let's you quickly add and manage new pages within your website.

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DNN 6.0 New Pages Interface

Also New In All Editions of DNN 6.0

While the slick new interface captures your immediate attention, there are a couple of other new things for all editions of DNN:

Integration with Windows Azure: If you want to run your website in the cloud, you now can do that on Windows Azure.
Direct Connection to Snowcovered.com: Also new is a direct connection to the DNN Extensions site, Snowcovered.com (modules and extensions). DNN has also aggregated all the community extensions found on DotNetNuke Forge, so you have one stop shopping for all your extensions. The integration of snowcovered.com means you can directly browse, purchase and download/install within DNN core platform.

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DNN 6.0 Extensions Catalog