I think I need to reconsider this platform

First some background.  I am the senior IT manager for a small video production company located in Canada.  I am not going to reveal the name of the company at this time but our main focus is instructional videos for the education sector; both public and private.  With the recent coronavirus situation remote education is more important than ever and we have reached out to schools to help them develop online courses using their current teachers where the students are already familiar.  To avoid a lengthy development period I am looking at off the shelf software to quickly get a portal in place where we can showcase our talents to prospective clients.  UNA looked promising until I started reading through some of the recent posts on this site; yes, being a senior manager means that I need to do my homework before making a decision.  It appears that the owner of the UNA parent company, Boonex Pty Limited, is pushing people to switch from the full UNA release to a beta version that appears to contain bugs.  The main reason for this rather strange request by the owner is that there is some problem with the market and people are unable to have a functioning site.  I am not going to bother with linking to these discussions as it is quite clear that UNA will be more problematic than it is worth.  If I am going to do business with a company, it has to be a serious reputable company and I have having my doubts with Boonex Pty Limited.  I have never heard of a company pushing a beta application for businesses to use in a production environment; just the opposite, they often stress that beta software is for testing purposes only and should never be used in a production environment.  I need to get the portal up quickly and certainly would not use beta software even if a release candidate version as I can not risk the portal having issues; it would reflect very badly on my company and would most likely result in lost revenue.  Therefore, I think I am going to have to reject UNA as a viable platform at this time.

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      Don't let the forum put you off. To be honest, am annoyed at how ignorant people are. For example, "How to change Splash Text" in different posts and they did not bother to use search first. Hence, those type of people would just go ahead and update to beta and then start complaining.

      Another good example... do you always agreed with movie critics? Have seen 2-stars rating movies and thought those movies were brilliant and should be 4 or 5. People have different taste, perspective, or whatever.

      Have you tried UNA? If not, how can you possibly know? Wordpress supposedly to be the best according to popularity. Have tried it and fooking hate it! Tried Joomla, don't like it as well. So, don't be afraid to try variety of platforms and then you can decide.

      They are not forcing anyone to upgrade to beta. Have several domains that's running in stable version 10.1, only one running in beta (11.0.0-RC2) for testing/reporting. Been with them since 2009 and am still loyal! I even helped shape UNA such as OpenStreetMap which will be default (future upgrade), Font Awesome version shown rather than hush (11.0.0-RC2). If you have idea/suggestion... maybe UNA will bring your wish to reality.

      • John-Wilkes I have been running UNA and have had good experience. The staff do help when the issues is legitimate and not trivial. I am also an early adopter and run whatever the latest version is whether Beta or RC as it allows me to provide feedback to UNA so they can improve.

        Give them a try with the free version and then see how you like it. Understand that you have to deploy quickly so this may not be the right choice for now but when you have time you may actually like the platform.  I have grown to like it very much though I was a bit critical at the start because I had so much money invested in Dohphin.  Jump in and see.

        • Hi John-Wilkes - please do not be put off by the Beta issue. We are not pushing the Beta, if you download the current version you will see that it is UNA 10.1. Although some users have gone ahead & downloaded the Beta versions and been caught with issues there. We made the mistake of updating some Apps whilst the core is still in Beta, this has been a mistake by our team, but it is not our common practice.
          There are many users of our software, some are present on this forum and some are not. Whilst some are dissatisfied with UNA for whatever reason, you will find the experience of the majority to be very positive. It's a fine piece of software, we are confident that it's the best in its class.
          Regardless of the Beta conversation, the UNA 11 final release is due within 48 hrs, why not give it a go? If you have any questions please ask via this thread or PM me directly - we can set up a call to demo the software and discuss your requirements if your would like.

          • John-Wilkes - I should also add that with our UNA 11 update we have developed much of the functionality to support a fully featured Learning Management System - if you'd like to know more please give me a PM.

            • Марк П write here. This will be interesting to many.

              • Whilst some are dissatisfied with UNA for whatever reason, you will find the experience of the majority to be very positive. It's a fine piece of software, we are confident that it's the best in its class.

                Yes, the majority is positive.  Great piece of software. It is difficult to please everyone so keep up the good work.

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