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Re: accessibility of Dot Net Nuke and SharePoint

for

From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Jun 4, 2007 8:30AM

> My company is considering Dot Net Nuke (DNN) and
> SharePoint for use in a fairly large upcoming project.

I assume you mean OR rather than AND? Not that you couldn't use both,
but I'd think it'd make a lot more sense to pick one.

> Because I am the only developer on the teams involved
> with any interest in topic of accessiblity, I have
> been tasked with collect in information on developing
> accessible applications with these 2 products.

Well, you are at a disadvantage by going with ANYTHING .net it seems.
;0)

That said, .net 2.0 is eons ahead of 1.1 in terms of web standards, so
that helps a lot.

The biggest frustration you'll find with Sharepoint is that most of the
web controls still pump out bloated table-based markup. For instance,
menus and *lists* of documents are not actually lists, but rather
tables. To move things to a more semantic, accessible, standards level
of markup, you'll have to gut your masterpages and templates and
probably use some custom web parts to handle things like navigation and
the like. At the very least, you'll want to go in and modify the HTML
markup of some of the default usercontrols.

> The links I have found for DNN are dated 3 or 4 years
> ago and refer to much earlier versions (v1 and v2).
> Most of the result for SharePoint queries send me back
> to Microsoft's.

The BIGGEST frustration with the current version (either WSS 3.0 and/or
MOSS 2007) is the absolute lack of quality documentation from MS. It
took us 5 meetings with Microsoft to even get them to tell us what we
had to purchase based on our requirements. Ugh. ;o)

The biggest nicety about the current version is that it is entirely
ASP.net 2.0 based, so you have MUCH more control over the interface
templates (using masterpages) and actual functionality (you can use any
ASP.net compliant code).

> If anyone on the list has some references or
> experiences they can share, it would be very helpful.
> I hoping to collect positive features, weaknesses that
> should be addressed during the design phase and bugs
> that need to be avoided or rebuilt for both tools.

I've found the yahoo group sponsored by Mindsharp to be very lively and
full of smart sharepoint folks:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/sharepointdiscussions/

Cameron Moll also just posted a pretty good post with valuable links on
his blog:

http://cameronmoll.com/archives/2007/05/skinning_ms_sharepoint_with_st/

And, finally, there are several MS-Sharepoint blogs worth subscribing
too. These give you a lot more information straight from the developers.

As for .net nuke, I haven't looked at that in a few years and it does
look like the application has made some great strides. If you are
considering .net options, you may also consider Community Server.

As stated, Joomla appears to be one of the few mass-market CMS systems
out there with a focus on getting the code base as standards and
accessibility compliant as possible. They are ahead of the curve
compared to most CMS systems from what I've read/seen. Of course, if you
are a MS shop, then you'll have to battle operations to get them to
consider something like Joomla. ;o)

> I am aware of one project (who shall remain nameless) who are using
> Sharepoint for a public website and they are rewriting every control
> for accessibility purposes. I was impressed because that's a pretty
> big job.

And this, ultimately, is where I get frustrated with MOST, if not all
CMS options. If one is going through the effort of rewriting a majority
of the default code-base, then why not just start from scratch and build
something that meets all of the specific needs of one's own
organization? Granted, Sharepoint dose have a massive framework for
document management and security and the like, so maybe it is a viable
option in this case.

Also, please send them an email and ask them NOT to remain nameless and
share their knowledge with us! ;o)

Or, even better, convince them to ZIP those files up and sell them. The
overhead for purchasing MOSS is immense and I'm sure it'd be easy for a
lot of organizations to justify spending a bit more to get a nice set of
accessible web controls pre-built for them.

Personally, I'd love to hear people comment on MOSS 07 used for public
facing web sites and how effective it is from an accessibility
standpoint. We currently have a home-grown CMS for our public sites, but
with the migration of our intranet to Sharepoint, I'm sure talk will
eventually sprout up about moving our public site to the same framework.

And I also thank you for that link, Alastair!

-Darrel