Upgrades. Sometimes I feel like upgrades come so quickly in the software market that it’s impossible to keep up with them. While the rapid rate of new releases and patches made possible by the application frameworks of today is of tremendous benefit in some ways (primarily security, if you ask me), that same pace is breathtaking for managers and administrators.

Minor upgrades or patches can help with stability and features, but they can also break existing functionality if you’re not paying attention. Have you ever downloaded an update for your computer only to find that a piece of software or your printer no longer works? Add to that the complexity involved when several 3rd party apps or plugins are involved! Phew, you can have a big mess on your hands with breaking changes before you can say, “Upgrade!”

So who wins the upgrade discussion? How would we even determine that? In our case, we’re looking at this from the perspective of a relatively inexperienced Admin user on each platform. Let’s pick a few of the main items you go through when performing upgrades, and rate the two products at each point.

**Notification and Alerts (System Awareness)**
Does your content management system notify you when an upgrade is available? Both DotNetNuke and WordPress, by default, post an obvious notification message to Admin users when they login. You can disable this feature in both systems if you don’t want to be bothered by the alerts, but I recommend the typical Admin keep the default settings in place, as updates are often related to security patches.

Winner for Notification and Awareness — Tie

**System/Framework Upgrade Process**
When you decide to proceed with the upgrade of your website, you’ve got options. WordPress and DNN both allow you to download and manually upload files over your existing installation, which will then trigger the upgrades to your site and database. Other than download size, that process is similar for both platforms.

Backing up your database and site files is critically important for both platforms, in case something goes wrong during installation. This isn’t really a how-to article series, so I’m not going to go into how to do that right here. It’s about the same for both systems, and a lot of that depends on what you’re doing with your site and what types of files you’re serving up on the web end of things.

For “most” admin users on WordPress, you can simply go the Updates portion of the admin dashboard and click a button to “Upgrade automatically.” This is the easier method of the two systems, for sure. In a sense, it’s almost too easy, b/c you could break your site without even thinking about it. I’ve never seen a WordPress upgrade break a site, but it happens all the time. Just take a walk through the WordPress forums and you’ll see tons of folks with post-upgrade problems. Still, it’s pretty amazing that you can simply push a button and get an upgrade, be it minor or major.

Of course, post-upgrade problems are plentiful with DotNetNuke, as well. Again, just breeze through the forums and you’ll see. Recent versions of DotNetNuke give a more secure upgrade, though, as the Host user account and password must be supplied before the automatic upgrade begins.

Winner for System/Framework Upgrade Process — WordPress

**Module/Plugin Upgrade Process**
Both DotNetNuke and WordPress provide a plugin library from within their respective frameworks. Both systems also supply an update notification system when viewing your existing/installed plugins and modules. As with the system upgrade process, WordPress allows a single screen whereby admin users can select all of their plugins that have upgrades available and perform mass updates all at once. Again, it’s almost “too easy,” because if something goes wrong in that case, you wouldn’t know which plugin caused the problem. In the case of DotNetNuke, and update available link allows you to visit the module site, or in some cases update from within the framework itself, one module at a time.

Winner for Module/Plugin Upgrade Process — WordPress

**Summary**
Pro users or avid fans of one or the other should neither be too upset or too proud of their preferred platform. We’re only on the 2nd post going into any significant review, and there is a lot more to come. Patrick replied to my last post on this subject and made a good point that these products are not the same when it comes to feature set, so in some ways it’s not really “fair” to be comparing them. While I agree to an extent that the products themselves are not them same, I also think there is no real way for the beginning consume to understand all those differences.

With all of that being said, I’m giving the nod to WordPress when it comes to the most common types of upgrades performed by the most common types of administrators. Every situation is unique, but there are generalizations that we can apply to the field. That’s what I’m trying to do with these posts. Don’t think I’m trying to bash DotNetNuke. Trust me, there are plenty of areas where DotNetNuke absolutely clobbers WordPress… we’ll get there! 🙂

[box type=”tick” size=”large” style=”rounded”]Overall winner for Upgrades – WordPress[/box]