[olug] olug website core changes.

[Christopher Cashell]

At Wed, 06 Oct 04, Unidentified Flying Banana Brian Roberson, said:
> All, Since php-nuke is now a pay for product I am looking into
> alternatives and would like any feedback on existing opensources CMS's
> that you have used.

I've been playing with Drupal[0] a bit recently, and I've been pretty
impressed with it.  It has a solid Content Management System, but also
supports things like web logging, if some of the OLUGers wanted to setup
Weblogs (well, those who haven't already set up a weblog on LiveJournal,
and joined the OLUG community there (shameless plug)).  Along with that,
it supports just about every common feature you'd want in a CMS.

One of the things that I particularly like about it, although this is
admittedly a little thing, is that Drupal makes excellent use of
mod_rewrite, so all the URL's that it generates or makes use of are very
readable, reasonably short, and search-engine friendly.

Also, for those of us who find PostgreSQL to be, for our needs, far
superior to a certain other popular open source database, Drupal
supports half a dozen different databases, instead of being limited to
one, like a lot of CMS software is.

> I have started looking at plone.org which runs on top of zope. I
> actually dont have a problem with paying for php-nuke, its the fact
> that you have to pay for every new release, so if there happens to be
> a bug in the one I bought, I would have to buy it again.  The whole
> Used-car ASIS statement.... and I dont agree with that for software,
> at least supply patches or information on overcoming a flaw in the
> software.

Hrm.  I have to agree, I don't care for the way they're doing that.  It
looks like they're charging for the newest release, but then making the
newest - 1 release available for free download. . . which wouldn't
bother me that much (reminds me somewhat of ghostscript development),
except that they don't seem to have any plan setup for security issues,
and PHP-Nuke has definitely had it's share of exploitable vulnerabilities.

Also, with PHP-Nuke being GPL'ed, I'm wondering how long before someone
purchases it, and then just puts the latest release up for download.
And I wonder what effect this could have on community development, as
only those who are willing to pay for the latest release will have
access to the latest codebase.

All in all, I have to agree with you.  This looks like a good time to
investigate alternatives.

 [0] http://drupal.org

-- 
| Christopher
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| Here I stand.  I can do no other.              |
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