Dot Net Nuke

I was approached with a problem, It seems that on our customer purchase page, we were not including state tax. So I was supposed to go in there and add the sales tax depending on which state was selected. Sounds simple, but DotNetNuke was a PAIN to work with. I can see why companies use it though, it is very easy to edit to those who may be a novie, but it is super frustrating when you need/want more control.First of all, it was slow to work work with, it seemed like hours for each page to load after I had edited them. On top of that, I could only be editing one thing at a time which drastically slowed me down.

Before the user had entered a two letter state code themselves, but I decided to change this to a drop down box and populate it via SQL(This was one nice feature of DNN). We had just hardcoded the price to a set value before, now it had to be dynamic. DNN allows each page to be created via a template, this one was using a dynamic forms template which essentially allowed us to use variable for each form. With each form, you could execute client side scripts(another nice feature), since it was client side I had to create a hidden textbox and depending on the state, it would return a value to that text box and add it onto the total at the end.

It seemed so easy to do at the begining, I knew exactly what had to be done. But just doing it in this new environment made is super difficult. It seems to be that way with any new language though and the more I mess with it the easier it becomes...I still think dot net nuke sucks though.