7 Questions for “His Mightiness” Will Strohl
A few weeks after sitting down with Antonio Chagoury, I flew down to Florida to speak at the Orlando DNN user group. While there, I took the chance to pull the president of the UG, Will Strohl, aside for my somewhat standard “7 Questions for” interview. Enjoy.
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For those in the DNN community who don’t already know you, can you tell us who you are and what you do?
I am a fellow DotNetNuke developer and designer that loves to figure out how DNN works under the hood. At one point, I began contributing to the community to help "give back," and it has led me to become the President of one of the most active DotNetNuke user groups, the Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group (ODUG.)
These days, I promote DNN to the developer community on my blog, at code camps, user groups, SQL Saturdays, and similar other events. In my day job, I am the Technology Director for RezHub.com, an online travel website, which means I get to play with DNN all day long! :)
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When and how did you get involved with DotNetNuke?
I built an Intranet portal while working as the only .Net developer in an AS/400 programming department. When I was tasked with the portal project, I looked at all of the options "out there" at the time and settled on the IBuySpy portal. I built all of the extra functionality into it that we needed, including: child portals, new pages, extra modules, a portal-wide "what's new" image designator, Active Directory integration, and more. Shortly after the launch I found DotNetNuke, which was "frustrating" to say the least. Consumed by the maintenance of my custom portal, I didn't have time to get involved with or use DNN until version 3. Once I did, there was no turning back. -
What draws you to open source software and to DNN in particular?
I had tried many open source projects before DNN as their price tag and free source code was highly appealing. However, all of them seem to have one thing in common: their community was full of the know-it-all type of people that berate you if you missed a step, or didn't know something that they felt you should. As a result, I was immediately turned off by the community and eventually the product as a whole. I found the DNN community to be a breathe of fresh air, as newbies are not talked down upon. However, I have been seeing a rising number of rather negative community members in recent months and it really concerns me. For everyone reading this: please play nice! -
Do you consider yourself a DotNetNuke evangelist?
Without coming across egotistical, I do indeed consider myself a DNN evangelist. I am regularly showing people the power of DNN. Whether they are fellow developers, my consulting and website clients, or non-technical folks who are interested in building their first website. DotNetNuke is always the first option I turn to when a new website project comes up, and it surprisingly has fit nearly every single project. Also, as new features are released, I find it to be lots of fun to show people how to use them. I think when you consider all of that, it would be difficult to not think of myself as a DNN evangelist. -
What does it mean to be President of the Orlando DNN User Group (ODUG) and what is your experience with getting other people involved in the community.
Being the President of ODUG is an incredible honor, but at the same time carries huge responsibilities. Should the user group fail, I would consider it to be my fault. If attendance goes up or down, I am responsible. If we don't have new faces at the meetings, I have also failed. I am not one to accept defeat and I do love a challenge. Since I am so passionate about the DNN project, I am naturally driven to help it succeed through ODUG.
However, one of the most rewarding parts of being the ODUG President is meeting many interesting and smart people on a regular basis. I also get to match folks up with DNN "buddies" to help solve problems. This year I have also been incredibly lucky to consistently draw top DNN talent to our user group meetings to present to ODUG members. It has been an incredible ride and I hope it doesn't end anytime soon.
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You and ODUG have recently announced The Day of DotNetNuke. Please tell us about the event and the effort behind it.
On June 4, 2008 we hosted the first and only OpenForce Connect event. It was an incredible day of learning and networking with fellow DNN community members. I have been getting requests regularly since then asking for a follow-up event.
Accepting the challenge once again, I began to email DNN Corp last November checking to see if they were interested in putting the event on again. Unfortunately, they were very busy with DNN Professional Edition, new staff, and stabilizing the latest DNN release. Needless to say, we eventually had to make a decision. Either we wait for DNN Corp to respond or we take the reigns and make it happen. We chose to latter.
The Day of DotNetNuke was originally the idea of Joe Healy, a Florida Microsoft Developer Evangelist and has grown tremendously ever since. Unfortunately, we have a cap of 200 people, which we nearly met last year.
This year's event is scheduled for Saturday, June 13 in Tampa, Florida and we already have 4 DotNetNuke book authors committed to presenting, as well as several other prominent DNN community members and vendors. Right now, we are officially accepting volunteers and sponsors and we should be opening up an official call for speakers next week.
We had people traveling from as far as Pakistan last year and I have no reason to believe that this year will be any different in terms of importance and interest. The first time around we had a single track of sessions and we did not have a sponsor area. This year, the event will still be free to attend, but we have grown to 5 tracks, a common sponsors area, lunch, and plenty of giveaways. It is definitely a must-attend event for anybody with an interest in DotNetNuke and its community.
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If you could change 3 things in the DNN web application framework, the community, or anything else related to DNN, what would they be?
- Currently, most of the negativity in the DNN community is directly and indirectly related to the changes in the DNN Corporation. Mostly, it is not really the Corp itself, but the lack of information coming from them. It has taken them several months to finally provide the community with the details it has been thirsting for. I would want the speed and frequency of community related communications to be better, faster, and more accurate, which will have a big impact on community morale.
- It is no secret that the community extension development effort has been slow going lately. I therefore wish someone would sponsor 2 clones for Scott Willhite to share his workload :)
- I think the community side of the DNN project needs to get back to its roots and regenerate the excitement it once possessed. I know that DNN Corp is aware of this and has plans to address this in various ways. We need to bring back the imagination, excitement, and creativity of the community with its start-up and viral kind-of-feel.
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