There are a few factors that I think make DotNetNuke a better online community, not the least of which is size. The DotNetNuke community is so much smaller (by millions) in size than the WordPress community. The WordPress community then, by default, cannot feel like  a small, family atmosphere. There are simply too many to expect any significant feeling of real fellowship among them.

The DotNetNuke online community, however, has an extended-family feel to it online. If you ask a question on Twitter with the #DotNetNuke hashtag, you’ll probably get a response from someone in the community, if not someone from DotNetNuke corporation itself, within an hour or less (more often within several minutes).

Now, it seems there would be more of this type of Q&A and camaraderie happening on the WordPress front, since it’s so huge and has also been around for several years. Alas, it seems there are precious few WordPress gurus, admins, friends and hacks that spend any amount of time online (at least on Twitter, which to me seems a good measure) responding to and assisting others with problems, helpful links, etc.

I’m still not sure that WordPress should take a hit just because it has such a huge user base. It’s just that I’ve never really found WordPress people particularly helpful. Now and again you’ll find a plugin developer or theme provider that has excellent support, but as I mentioned in a previous post in this series, your interpretation of “good support” has an awful lot to do with your own expectations. You can get bad support for just about any product out there, and I’ve had bad support for both WordPress and DotNetNuke products.

The wordpress.org site, with its extensive cache of plugins and themes, offers generally good support within that framework. The dotnetnuke.com site is also full of forums and free extensions, so users can ask questions and get help with just about anything. Something tells me, though, that most of the folks who help and support in the DotNetNuke community would generally give you the shirt off their back as well as help you with your website. There’s a warmth and a brotherhood of sorts among DNN people that you just don’t get on the WordPress side.

I suppose this post is entirely my opinion, and I could be very wrong about the WordPress community. There are bound to be pockets of users and groups in that world that I simply haven’t heard of yet or found. Perhaps I’m looking in all the wrong places (hmmm, sounds like a good line for a song…).