Support Forum

Things appear to be moving relatively slowly in the PostNuke world with other CMS projects like Joomla rapidly overtaking us.
What's the level of enthusiasm and drive left in the PostNuke team?
What's the roadmap and key milestones?

I'd say have a look at the .8 and the related forum here. Things might not move as fast as some other CMSses, but the stability, flexibility, scalability, extendability, some fantastic (Pagesetter, but also others) modules, the new database API, the new forms API, the matur(ing/ed) Xhanthia implementation will definitely keep me here. I regularly have to do some trouble shooting on Joomla based sites and every time I realize I'm very glad I can convince my clients to go the PostNuke route.

Perhaps sometimes slowly (although that is not really true for the past six months if you follow what is happening), but definitely surely moving towards the perfect CMS for me. For the level of enthusiasm have a look at all new ideas and developments made public over the last three months (the meeting in Germany, Jorn's new ideas for a Pagesetter successor).

At the moment there are many activities, not only relating to the long-awaited upcoming .8 version.
A lot of projects do not show their potentials for now, but are preparing the future of PN in the long-term.

The lull before the storm...

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Dittos to dits reply. I've seen a recent renewal of enthusiasm, as well as, development of features and modules, that continue to make PostNuke the best choice of CMS for me.

Anyways... I just want to say that I am excited about PostNuke again.

With .8 upcoming, the teams are ramping up...

The RC2 bugs are being worked out..
The legal matters of $NewName are running there course.
This year's Steering Committee are prepping for the roll-out.
Third party developers are working the new source.
Key community-support personnel are working with the .8 RCs to get accustomed.
The newly formed documentation Team are working toward a comprehensive handbook. (thats me )
There are many new projects on the horizon, which will make this project a real power player.

..to name a few.



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-- David Pahl -- (PostNuke Support Team)

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If you compare what's in PostNuke .8 to what's in Joomla 1.5, you'll find PostNuke is more advanced in so many areas. I don't think anyone here will try to tell you PostNuke's community is bigger, or that PostNuke's 3rd party module complement is as big, but what we do have (Pagesetter, Jorn's upcoming content module, scribite and so on) makes up for so much of what we don't have.

Plus, comparing potential, PostNuke .8 gets us past many of the 'hard' milestones, such as multi database compatibility, fully templated core, DBUtil and the object library. To get away from comparing PostNuke with Joomla for a minute, on it's own, PostNuke with it's advanced permissions, good performance and development utilties like the component of ObjectUtil and pnForms, PostNuke compares favourably even with some commercial CMSs.

What we need is to build up the community so that more third party developers come and start to use the system for their own developments. That way we increase the featureset available with PostNuke, and it's attractiveness to more users. From there, it snowballs and we get bigger and bigger.

After .8 we shift focus to promoting PostNuke and showing the world what it offers. In preparation for that we've got the documentation project running, the project rename process finishing up and we're also considering where to take PostNuke after .8 is released (there's a page in the Wiki on this already). We're also considering how to improve PostNuke's usability and just how to market PostNuke to the outside world. I think the future's bright...

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Regards,
Simon

itbegins.co.uk - PostNuke Consulting

Please read the Support Guide

The pace of development is ridiculously slow.

Back in July it was only going to be a few weeks more !

I would like to see the people involved in all this free development broaden their horizons and do some side work for pay. Occasionally, I need a little change or alteration and have no problems paying for the work. So far, no one has ever taken me up on it.
Not only would this reward them for their work, but extend PostNuke in a more useful direction.
I just went by postnukepro.com and it seems to be down or gone.

It almost seems that the people able to do the work required, turn their nose up whenever money is mentioned.

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- Darryl -

I have long done PostNuke consulting on a casual basis, and I now do more than I ever used to - to the extent I redesigned my site recently to focus on the consulting side. However, I don't want my consulting work to impact on the time I have to devote to PostNuke in my normal capacity as a volunteer. If every person working with PostNuke started exclusively doing paid work PN would grind to a halt, and that's something I want to avoid, at least with myself.

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Regards,
Simon

itbegins.co.uk - PostNuke Consulting

Please read the Support Guide

Simon is right.
I am also doing more paid work with PN than ever, but I do not stop contributing free stuff though.

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I don't mean to say that everyone should run off and start requiring money for everything they do. The people that create PostNuke and the modules for free should be open to extending the functionality. Since the request may not be part of the roadmap, the person requesting could offer some cash to the developer(s) as an incentive. This would help the module become more than what the developer invisioned.

As an example: I would like to use pnForum for comments to Pagesetter documents with the comments for each publication type going to a specific forum. Simple and great idea, but I don't see it ever being done.

Another example: If a web site use uploads a non-jpg in a Pagesetter image upload field, the whole document gets nuked (no pun intended) and is gone forever. My customers and I feel that this is a serious but and would like to see it fixed.

I seen nothing wrong with a developer taking on a few projects like this. Not everything has to be done for free and it doesn't make you a bad person to take on a few paid projects.

Maybe something like a bounty system???

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- Darryl -

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I seen nothing wrong with a developer taking on a few projects like this. Not everything has to be done for free and it doesn't make you a bad person to take on a few paid projects.

dks: I understand your point of view - here is mine as one of the devs

1) I work 100% of my spare time doing free work, so there is simply no time for paid work, 2) if someone pays me for doing what I do, then I have to adhere to some kind of time schedule, which is utterly impossible for me, 3) if I make it for free, then I can choose to make what I think is fun, 4) if I get paid then I *will* get into problems when it comes to deciding whether or not the code fullfills the requirements.

So, coding for free is simply much more fun than doing paid coding - it's nothing religious, just a simple evaluation of the pros and cons of coding.

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Maybe something like a bounty system???

I'm working on something like rent a coder for PostNuke as we speak. The idea is similar to rent a coder in that you post jobs and receive bids. I haven't worked out the fine details yet because obviously it's a fairly major undertaking - however if more people express an interest in getting the system up and running then I'll see if I can dedicate some more time to getting it out there.

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Regards,
Simon

itbegins.co.uk - PostNuke Consulting

Please read the Support Guide

HammerHead

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Maybe something like a bounty system???

I'm working on something like rent a coder for PostNuke as we speak. The idea is similar to rent a coder in that you post jobs and receive bids. I haven't worked out the fine details yet because obviously it's a fairly major undertaking - however if more people express an interest in getting the system up and running then I'll see if I can dedicate some more time to getting it out there.

I believe Axel has the ground work laid for this, IIRC...

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-- David Pahl -- (PostNuke Support Team)

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I believe Axel has the ground work laid for this, IIRC...

My code is almost written, it's the other aspects that are problematic. Sounds like great minds think alike to me...

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Regards,
Simon

itbegins.co.uk - PostNuke Consulting

Please read the Support Guide