Sandbox Major Issues

I've been using DotNetNuke for the last 8 years and after much research have put Sitefinity at the top of my replacement list.

After working with the online sandbox for half an hour, I'm pretty shocked and frustrated. First, page loads are extremely slow. Second, I've already ran into about 5 bugs in the first 30 minutes doing very basic stuff. For example, I used the Company site template and then created a new page and left all the defaults. When I try going to the new page, I get no response after 15 minutes of doing everything I can think of to get a blank page to load. I can't replace the logo or the copyright text after several attempts. Trying to rearrange page sequence generated an error with no text and after the dismissing the error message, the page hierarchy flattened out on the page management page. I created a new subpage below the first page and it loads completely blank with no header, footer, content or anything other than white space.

I've been a full-time CMS professional for 17 years and I don't think I've seen a CMS demo this problematic. As it stands now, I've got to seriously rethink keeping Sitefinity on my prospect list at all. I drive the technology at a Fortune 100 company and I've been considering a major deployment. Unless anyone can explain these issues, I think I've got to go back to the drawing board.

Thanks,
John

Hi John,

Yeah, I can understand what you mean. I'm not a big fan of the demos, either.
On the other hand I'm still a fan of Sitefinity, specially version 3.7. The new 4.2 is getting better, though!

If you would like me to get you a demo, let me know. I think I can come up with something better, so that you can have a decent compromise before saying goodbye to Sitefinity.

Best regards,
Daniel

I have to say that the primary reasons I want to move us off DotNetNuke is because is it sluggish and they keep releasing buggy versions into production. So far, this appears to be the same traits I'm seeing with your product. DNN is free, I've already built sites built on it and have 8 years of experience working with it and dozens of add-ons.

I was hoping that if I spent several thousand dollars buying a commercial CMS instead of using a free, open-source one, I would get a much more robust solution and not have to deal with bugs in production releases. To me, that would be worth paying thousands of dollars. But, if I'm going to get similar experience, I can't see spending the money on what I'm already getting for free.

I started my first software development company in 1983 and in the years that followed, learned valuable lessons about developing personas, user scenarios and test cases so that I could release stable predictable solutions. What seems strange to me is that telerik offers test management software and yet it is releasing buggy software into production. Something seems wrong with this picture to me. I'm not trying to be critical. It's just that I based my evaluation on finding a vendor who possessed the tools and understood the value of testing their products prior to deployment.

Anyway, I'll keep an eye on what you're doing but I've got to reevaluate my options to see if I can find a robust, stable CMS upon which to build my future. If you release a version that is stable and your demo doesn't blow up running on it, please let me know.

Thanks for your help,
John