Breaking News - the v3.1.0 Release is Here!
The core team has released DotNetNuke v3.1.0, and did it while they were at TechEd 05 in Orlando! Major changes in v3.1.0:
Visit the site and you'll see there's a new logo and site design on DotNetNuke.com - looks really nice! The site continues to evolve and get better organized to better serve the community.
WARNING: read the installation instructions for this upgrade!!
You can find the installation instructions here: \Documentation\Public\DotNetNuke Installation Guide.doc inside the distribution zipfile. The gist of it is that the MachineKeys (cryptography keys for the membership database) are now generated for each machine on a clean install. You must make a backup copy of your current web.config file and copy the SQL connection string info (and any other custom settings) into the new release.config file before renaming it to web.config. If you fail to copy over your machine keys, your users (including you) won't be able to login. See my installation notes for more information.
I've with every beta version of DNN v3 since v3.0.4 (the first v3 public beta, released November 2004), and most recently I've been doing a lot of custom module development in preparation for my MSDN Webcast series on DNN. This production v3 release is a great product with a tremendous number of functional changes and enhancements, usability improvements, and significant core reorganization. Much has changed, both for portal administrators and for custom module developers. See my New Features Summary page for a synopsis of what's new.
I can finally recommend with the v3 production release that you consider upgrading your v1 and v2 DotNetNuke sites to v3. Unless you've used only the standard modules, however, your upgrade path will likely be challenging. Watch for my upcoming Upgrading to V3 notes for some tips and pointers. There are a steadily-increasing number of v3 modules available, both free and at a modest cost - so you should be able to find replacement modules if your v2 module providers are slow moving to the new version.
If you haven't already, I encourage you to install v3 on a development machine and begin exploring it. This way you can get a good feel for how the latest version works and the changes since v2. It's also good practice to try upgrading using a backup of your current site. Please post your experiences in the DNN forums for all to learn from, especially if you find bugs or other problems with this process. That's the community spirit that DNN is built on!