> I have run into conversation about a PHP program called PostNuke. Can
> anyone explain to me just what this is?

A content management system, a rather easy way to set up a site that allows for community posting.

The background history: Originally Francisco Burzi sat down and created PHPNuke. His program became popular and soon scaled to a level that was beyond Burzi's ability to manage. He accepted help from outside programmers but he treated them badly. He often did not credit them for work they did, and also he failed to fix bugs they repeatedly pointed out to him, even when they submitted bug fixes. A number of these programmers became angry, and decided to fork PHPNuke, and come up with their own version, which is PostNuke.

On the bright side: PostNuke aims for a higher level of code quality than what you'll find in PHPNuke. Therefore it should be more stable. The developer team is more democratic. There is more emphasis on fixing bugs. The design is more modular, therefore, in theory, it should be easier to customize.

However, I have tried to use PostNuke and it was an inhuman pain. It is undergoing very rapid development so a new version is out every 4 months and these versions are very different from one another. The core developer team is still making some fairly fundamental changes to the underlying architecture, rejecting decisions that Burzi made in terms of design. The changes are so fundamental that someone with experience with version .63 couldn't help me out because I was working with version .703. And I started using version .703 right before version .71 came out, which had a totally different architecture for buffering output and then printing it to the screen. This was a big deal since I was trying to customize the output to the screen, and no one wanted to help with my problems since my problems were with an "out of date" version.

I spent a month trying to customize PostNuke for a client, and then I gave up. It was too hard and the support was non-existent. Although you'll find many people in the community who want to help you, you'll find no one who has experience with the particular version you've got. And, worst, the developer team puts all of its energy into writing code and none of it into answering people's questions. This, to my mind, compares badly with Phorum, another open source PHP project, where Brian Moon and the other core developers spend significant amounts of time in the support forums answering people's questions.

If you were me, you would avoid PostNuke like it was small pox.

A bunch of us PHP coders here in Charlottesville, Virginia have recently had bad experiences with both PHPNuke and PostNuke. Therefore we've decided to write our own community CMS from scratch. I know its been done a hundred times before, but every group needs something different, and I suppose sometimes it is easier to write something from scratch than to customize existing software.

If I knew Java then I would use ArsDigita. Or if I had my own server and felt like learning Tcl and AOL_Server. Phillip Greenspun thought about these issues a long time before the rest of us did and he came up with what is probably the best software for the job. Originally it only worked with Oracle as the database, but now it can also work with PostgreSQL. But it is resource hungry.

I'm working on two projects right now, a weblog and a CMS. We hope the CMS will be fairly light and simple. Of course, they all start that way. Then they go downhill.

take care,

Lawrence Krubner