It's been a while. I guess this post will make up for
lost time...
Weblogs: I've been looking around for a
weblog/forum package which has the feature set I'm needing,
without some of the built-in design and performance flaws
of Slash. I came
across PHP-Nuke by
accident, after noticing that debianHELP went
online using it. The feature spread is there, it's written
in PHP bolted up to MySQL (which is a fairly
good performer), and seemed relatively navigable, so I
downloaded it and gave it a spin.
Initial impressions:
- No database access abstraction, so there's no hope for
trying to bolt it up to (for example) PostgreSQL instead
without heavy modifications. One site (warning,
Spanish ahead) mentioned that they were working on creating
an abstraction layer, but it doesn't look like they've
released anything yet. <RANT>This has got to be PHP's
single biggest failing: lack of a project-independant
transparent database
API, such as
Perl's
DBI/DBD scheme, or
Python's DB-
API.</RANT>
- Security is scary. The documentation recommends mode
666 and 777 nearly everywhere, and the adminstration
interface includes a complete file manager for working on
your website. This is just plain overkill; if you need site
management tools, look into making effective use of mod_dav or
something (hi, gstein ;-) Luckily, most of
this functionality is easily disabled, and files on disk
are only written to by the admin frontend; normal system
use does everything through the database backend, or
through read-only access to the filesystem.
- Performance seems to be a little limited, but my
testbed hardware isn't exactly the latest and greatest. I'm
a little concerned how it will handle heavy load;
debianHELP seems to be seeing a steady decrease in
responsiveness as more people find out about it, for
example (if anyone from there is reading this, I'd love to
hear your
experiences from rolling out the site and watching the
userbase grow).
- Built-in RSS handling makes adding syndication boxes
from other news sites a snap, but it's not per-user
configurable like /.'s interface. I'll have to see if
that's something easily added or not. Of course, there's
RSS/XML exportation of the articles posted to the PHP-Nuke
system too.
- Whassup with the name? ;-)
- The built-in theming support is a nice touch;
uneccessary, but a pleasant end-user usability feature. See
SourceForge for
another example of site-wide theming based on user
preference.
Overall, it looks managable, but I have a few serious
concerns. Other systems I've been considering are Slash (made famous by
/.), Squishdot (see Technocrat as an
example), Scoop (Kuro5hin is an example
most of us know), and, of course, mod_virgule
(as seen here).
They all have their strengths and weaknesses; mod_virgule
was my first choice (for simplicity), but I really don't
need the trust metric management (which is the main drawing
card here). I similarly skipped on Scoop, since I didn't
need the peer-reviewing of articles, it's main feature over
Slash. Slash and Scoop both have scalability and
performance issues I'd rather not worry about initially,
and Squishdot wasn't quite feature-complete for me (no
individual preferences management). Squishdot also imposed
the requirement of installing and maintaining Zope; while not a bad thing
in and of itself, I don't have any other use for it right
now, making it unneeded additional administrative
overhead.
Anyone else have any systems I should take a peek at?
Obligatory personal stuff: At the
stroke of midnight, there will be 11 days, 6 hours, and 30
minutes until I am on an airplane with a very special woman
on my way to the Carribean. This vacation couldn't come at
a better time, for an unimaginable number of reasons.
Advogato diary musings: I've seen a
number of people posting anti-employer sentiments here (and
I'm among them). I wonder why I, or others, don't worry
about said employers reading this information, and using it
against them in their workplace? Do we not worry about it
at all, because this forum has an "in the company of
friends" feel to it? Is it the anonymizing nature of these
diaries? Hmm.
More later, I'm sure. :-)