Starting off this project, we set out to build a social-rich site for the passionate DNN community. Most of us DNN Folks already spread our love of DNN all over Twitter, LinkedIn, DNNChat, and countless other places. We were looking for a place to centralize that love for DNN. Knowing that there is already adoption for all the other social tools out there, it was a challenge to think of reasons for users to want to use our site over, or in addition to their favorite social media outlets.

The heart (see what I did there?) of the first phase of the I Heart DNN site was all about telling us why you love DNN. A simple activity feed for you to share your love of DNN front and center. You hit the site, login with your preferred social media, and you're ready to tell the world how you feel. Since you have to be a user to share, we felt that having the login be tied to your social media account was the easiest, and lightest barrier to entry (for more about what we did there check out Brian's post).

So once you logged in, told the world how much DNN rocks your socks, now what? Well, we have other features cooking, but for the meantime why not fill out your profile? Assuming users will be curious and click around the site to learn about all these other like-minded DNN fans, you want to make sure that you have something for them to discover.

For I ♥ DNN, we wanted to bring the barrier to entry very, very low, so that anyone could join the conversation simply and easily, without having to create yet another website account. To that end, we wanted to allow folks to sign in with their existing social network logins: Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Since these are provided with DNN, we assumed it would be fairly simple to achieve our vision. However, we ran into a handful of obstacles that we worked to overcome in implementing the core social login providers, ultimately copying and extending them to better meet our needs.