The DotNetNuke team has a few things to celebrate. It recently closed on a round of financing, won a pair of awards in Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Awards, and is getting ready for the release of DotNetNuke 5.0.In terms of financing, the DotNetNuke team is being vague about the actual amount being injected by August Capital and Sierra Ventures. That said, it's certainly reassuring to know that it has the financial backing to support its ongoing growth and road map. While the DotNetNuke software itself is free and open source, the company does have revenue from its support program and is preparing a for-fee professional version of its software.

DotNetNuke took home third-place finishes in both the 2008 Best Open Source CMS and 2008 Best Other Open Source CMS Award (awarded to non-PHP-based platforms) in Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Awards. This year's field of nominees was particularly strong, so third place is quite an accomplishment in both of those categories.

According to their road map, DotNetNuke 5.0 fixes some 500 bugs and adds over 40 enhancements and new features. Among the most interesting are the introduction of a framework for supporting widgets, improvement in its accessibility support for WCAG and ADA compliance, the ability to granularly assign administrative functions, and improved JavaScript implementation via jQuery support. While the second release candidate of DotNetNuke 5.0 is available now if you want to give it a test drive, the final version should be coming soon.

Because it was written in VB .Net and runs on top of the ASP .Net framework, DotNetNuke is most likely to be of particular interest to Microsoft shops. That said, it has a solid set of base functionality, a terrific user community, and an impressive set of modules that extend its functionality. Add to this the recent injection of additional funding, and it appears that there's little risk of DotNetNuke dying on the vine.