Santosh Benjamin

Rainbows and Nukes

So, I'm finally getting started on re-building my church website. We are going to be using Rainbow Portal for it. Spent a long time trying to choose between Rainbow and DotNetNuke. Actually my evaluation was a bit biased initially since when I first started the comparison, DNN was in v 1.0 and was quite poor compared to Rainbow. DNN v2.0 has been a complete rewrite and does look more like a contender but unfortunately, I cannot get it to look the way I want to without writing an entire skin myself. I am not a hardcore ASP.NET developer and I cannot do this!!

The requirements are quite simple. A horizontal menu on the top which when clicked gives me more options on the left - no dropdowns please, thus working like a different front page. In Rainbow I can do this with subtabs, but in DNN i cannot do this out of the box.

I must admit the skinning seems better in DNN. In Rainbow the stuff is all over the place. I nearly tore my hair out trying to use a new skin based on the default Orange theme and found that the developer had simply ignored the main CSS and forced colors into table rows and columns quite arbitrarily. I guess its not the fault of the portal if the developer chooses to ignore basic rules, but in DNN, the skins are done completely separate from the module code so its easier to enforce standards. Rainbow v2 promises to have a new skinning engine and they have a good team already so Im quite sure V2 will have a lot to offer. Besides DNN out of the box has only a few modules and has built up a commercial ecosystem around itself. I havent come across commercial portlet providers for Rainbow but there must be some out there. Not that I'm going to buy any right now. Rainbow has more than 45 default portlets.

I wonder if these portal servers will soon become WSRP compliant? Or is that too much to ask from open source systems? Maybe eventually I will have a site with a rich set of custom portlets that can easily be configured to fit in either a Rainbow or DNN portal server. All for free of course. Was even planning to rewrite the Reports Starter Kit into the Portal Starter Kit framework. For all this though I need more than 24 hours in a day. Its just not happening now.

Anyway, I might still play around with a DNN version of the site and see what happens. Perhaps I would be inspired enough to create a good skin for it myself. I'll keep you posted.