> How is DNN deployed? Is it a common ASP.NET project, or are there other web server requirements?

That's several questions so I can't give a short answer.

In practice:

• Windows
• IIS
• SQL Server 2000 compatible ie MSDE, SQL 2005, SQL Express

On this platform it is easily deployed (unzip install file into an IIS virtual directory or server, point it at an empty SQL database, and off you go).

In theory:

• Any OS
• Any web server
• Any Database (Oracle, postgres, mysql, firebird...).

The problem with the theory is that the further you stray from the IIS+SQL path , the more difficulties you will hit. In particular, one of the strengths of DNN is the third-party module support: some of them are awesome (eg Document Exchange); however, they likely as not will support SQL Server backend only.

DNN's biggest flaw is does not provide a fully-abstracted database API, instead it is pluggable. While the core framework has database providers for several different back-ends, a module writer generally still needs to write separate providers for each database they wish to support.

That said, there are people running DNN on other platforms. The usual one mentioned here is http://dev.mainsoft.com/ which is PostgreSQL+Linux