Following the footsteps of the now very successfull launch of the Plankroad Chamber website (North Syracuse), Liverpool found it time to revamp its current website technology as well as provide a more current look and feel.

The current content management system provided was based on a older PHP web technology and required much maintenance and support from the vendor costing the chamber time and money.  Moving to a open standard and fully supported enterprise content management system was the direction the chamber wanted to go.

When confronted with multiple choices for the chambers next web project, it was clear that ICTG and its development support of the open source DotNetNuke framework was the solution. 

Bried History of DotNetNuke - as taken from the DotNetNuke Portal website.

In January 2002, Microsoft Corporation published a download named the IBuySpy Portal to demonstrate how to implement specific functionality on the new ASP.NET 1.0 platform.  The kits, which provided full source code under a liberal EULA, were functional, but very simplistic, and were intended to aid programmers in developing projects of their own.

On December 24th, 2002, Shaun Walker, a DNN Corp. Founder, released a modified version of the original IBuySpy portal application. The release, which was posted as a link on the Microsoft ASP.NET Forums, included a variety of enhancements and innovations over the original code, including the ability to support multiple portals from a single installation, a feature which became very popular in the shared web hosting market.

In the weeks following Walker’s release, thousands of developers from around the world downloaded the code, provided feedback, and created the foundation for an active and loyal development community.  
After a number of rapid releases, the application was renamed DotNetNuke on February 28, 2003. The DotNetNuke name was chosen to reflect the application’s roots in the .NET Framework, coupled with the term “nuke,” due to its industry-wide association with open source web content management systems.

In September 2006, Shaun Walker founded DotNetNuke Corporation, or DNN Corp., dedicated to the ongoing stewardship and management of the DotNetNuke project. Joining Shaun on the original management team were three long-time DNN community members, Scott Willhite, Joe Brinkman, and Nik Kalyani, who had demonstrated their commitment and value to the project over the previous three years.

In November 2008, DNN Corp. announced that it had successfully raised “Series A” Funding through top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firms August Capital and Sierra Ventures.  In December of 2008, DNN Corp. announced that Navin Nagiah, a seasoned executive in the open source space, joined the company as CEO.

Moving forward, the company remains committed to the ideals established in 2002—to build an open framework informed by direct feedback, adopted best practices, and continuous improvement.  The company will continue to actively lead ongoing development of the DotNetNuke framework, and maintain a consistent and balanced approach to community ideals and commercialization, with the goal of making DotNetNuke the most usable, extensible, and valuable open source framework available.

Check out the website for more information: www.dotnetnuke.com