Wow.  After many, many months of prep and thinking and work, DNN Connect 2014 is now a memory.  Amazing how so much work can go into something and just like that it’s over.  BUT, what an awesome experience!

Whenever family gets together it’s always interesting.  Any time you can bring together DNNizens in an environment where there’s plenty of pasta and wine it’s a good day.

One thing we really appreciate about DNN community meetings is the way that the community can share a common heart and mind.  We don’t agree about everything but what family does?  But together we’re able to accomplish so much more…

So we had a fun, jam-packed weekend at DNN Connect 2014!

What Makes DNN Community Meetings So Awesome?

It wasn’t only the speakers. Maybe it wasn’t only the topics, the food or the location. What made DNN Connect 2014 so incredible was how much “giving back” happened. It was the thread that held everything from speakers and talks to genius bars to after parties together.

You see people give back when you see out of town guests fly in from far away (on their own dime) to share insights with the community, or when you see locals share tips on what they’ve been learning. You can see it when people answer questions for hours – without renumeration. And you see it when people burn hours prepping a party or posting signs, all so others can have a great time.

… A volunteer event. For the community. By the community.

What We Brought To The Table

There's a ton of good stuff to highlight, but we want to share some of our ideas as a recap of our presentation. So let's get right into it.

If you attended our presentation on Sunday, we thank you. If you took the time to seek us out at DNN Connect and speak with us, your actions were greatly appreciated.

We have to say that the feedback received from our presentation was much more than we expected. The community received very well the 2 ideas that we presented, one of using DNN as a platform for building MVPs and the other on separating the DNN core from UI and build a totally new UI.

MVPs?

Are you a developer who wants to cut down the amount of time it takes to build a prototype? Are you a product person who can’t code? Do you have a product idea that you want to validate quickly? If any of those describe you, you should read further…

Well, the idea behind an MVP is to build something fast and cheap that would illustrate the idea without wasting resources on bells and whistles. The goal is to get feedback, acquire early adopters or hold an internal or investor demo.

We believe that DNN is a perfect fit for this scenario because the way the platform is designed and also there are many extensions that can be used out of the box.

Furthermore, there is no solution for building web app MVPs, so we think it would be a great strategy to position DNN on a niche market, rather that selling it as a CMS and competing with the big guys.

Why Not DNN Platform As It Is?

We all know that what slows down app development in DNN is the skinning and the administration part. That's where our idea of separating the DNN core from the DNN UI  comes into play. By doing so, we'll implement a totally new UI that ups the game…

The Revolution In DNN Is Here

Two months ago, we released a sneak peek of what aims to be a revolution in DNN. And once with DNN Connect this revolution has a name…

Guys, say hello to Sharp Look!

...A sleek skinning engine, touch optimized. It supports keyboard search like Windows 8, it introduces a new mode for designers (besides the traditional View, Edit, Layout), skins and panes can be designed in the layout mode without having to touch code and much more.

Since our first sneak peek, there has been a lot of activity, in the form of both excitement and frustration, related to the status of the project. We know that this one is taking a while to finish, but we promise that it will be worth it in the end!

We made the decision as a team to spend extra time on Sharp Look, even if it meant breaking our normal production schedule. To help put people’s minds at ease, however, we have put together an little update at DNN Connect on where we are at with the project. Although we don’t have a release date set, we can say that we are now in the later stages of development.

Sharp Look features have been demonstrated during our DNN Connect presentation. However, because the video quality of the projector was very poor, we've remade this video.

Couldn’t Make It To DNN Connect? No Problem!

If you missed our live presentation or you'd like to get an idea of where we're headed, you can still learn by checking out the handy video below. Be sure to watch it!

We are sorry that Sharp Look is taking longer than many of you might of hoped, but we hope this additional sneak peek has explained why the extra wait is the sign of a great product, and not a sign of laziness on our part. Now more than ever, we are working hard every day to make Sharp Look stable. So keep your eyes peeled for Sharp Look’s release in the nearish future.

We're very excited to show you what's the future holds for DNN, but if you want to see it for yourself, just let us know and we’ll be more than happy to send you a build to play with live hands.

We would be deeply grateful to those who could offer their feedback to help us make Sharp Look more beautiful, functional and useful.

We've stepped up the pace of innovation at DNN Sharp, and more is in the pipeline! So why not subscribe to our newsletter to get the big picture of what we’ve been up to and where we're headed next with Sharp Look.

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And if you are reading this and you are on Twitter, or Facebook take the moment to head on over to our pages and follow us for many more incredible surprises. You’ll thank us later.

But that's only half of the DNN Connect presentation story. The rest is our suite of modules, which makes it very easy to build web apps. They are powered by Angular JS and Bootstrap and a great architecture to make them ultra responsive and scalable. They can easily be extended with new functionality, and as a matter of fact we already achieved integrations with providers such as Clickatell, Mailchimp, Salesforce and a few others.

Last, But Certainly Not Least… THANK YOU

And lastly, we thank you to the DNN community for getting involved and jumping on the opportunities that DNN Connect provided. We had a great weekend, met a lot of awesome people, and can’t wait for next one!

We were thrilled to meet you in person and we truly hope our paths will cross again.

All in all DNN Connect 2014 was a great time of connecting, sharing, dreaming and learning...

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