[pmwiki-users] Meetup? Drupal?

[Crisses]

On Oct 1, 2006, at 5:33 AM, Joachim Durchholz wrote:

> Crisses schrieb:
>> I rejected Joomla! (and hence Mambo) because, while their best
>> business directory ($99) was ok they have a set number of user groups
>> out of the box.  Extending to customizable user groups requires
>> breaking the package and comes with NO guarantees that other modules
>> (purchased or not) would continue to work after.
>
> Right. The set of user groups is fixed, though the rights that you
> assign to them isn't fixed AFAIK.

But it means you get only a set number of groups (something like  
admins, moderators, guests and registered users, give-or-take a group  
or two) and I needed things like trial member, lifetime member,  
monthly member, etc.

> Another limitation is that the hierarchy for texts is exactly two  
> levels
> deep. (That's just as in PmWiki.)

I believe this is extensible in PmWiki via cookbook recipe(s?).   
Without breaking the core ;)

> They plan to add both feature next year. Whether plan and reality will
> match or not, if you need any of these features, Joomla isn't  
> suitable.

Next year is far too long.  How many people want to wait up to 15  
months for something as vital as extensible groups?

> I'm surprised that Crisses talks about a price for a business  
> directory.
> Joomla is GPLd, so any reasons you'd need a commercial license for  
> would
> have to be nontechnical. Actually I don't even see a commercial  
> license
> offered.

There are modules offered for Joomla for which you must pay.  GPL  
does not mean FREE.  And GPL does not mean you can't have proprietary  
add-ons.  See ThunderCart for PmWiki's proprietary add-on -- in this  
case it's hosted -- since it's not distributed to anyone, they don't  
need to make the source code available.  Most GPL software is offered  
for free, but free is optional.  When you give someone software with  
a GPL license you must make the source code available to them.   
That's pretty much all it means.

For the business directory add-on I bought for Joomla, it has a  
license fee.  Yep.

If I made a PmWiki shopping cart, nothing would stop me from selling  
it except my open-source ethics ;)  I would hope that maybe it would  
either add significantly to my programming portfolio and impress more  
people into being my customers OR that enough people would want me to  
extend the capabilities and back such up with money that it would be  
worth my time.

> Maybe that was a leftover from Mambo, which is being done by a
> commercial company that may be selling licenses.

The license fee was for the add-on.

I noticed that it was going to cost me about $200 to get all the  
features I wanted using Joomla! -- that wasn't what stopped me.  What  
stopped me was that adding the hack that fixed the group issue meant  
I might break $200 worth of add-ons.

>> You don't have to break the core package
>> to add an extension (Joomla & oscommerce are guilty as charged!).
>
> I agree about OsCommerce here. OsCommerce recipes are mostly  
> patches to
> the core code. Well, it doesn't give any guarantees to begin with,  
> it's
> been in beta status for several years now, so there...
> However, Joomla is more similar to PmWiki in this respect. For some
> things, you'd have to hack up the core, but there's a lot of room and
> hooks for plugins. (PmWiki isn't different in this respect.)

I didn't ask the core development team to fix the broken group issue  
for Joomla! so I can't say how responsive the team would be to my  
needs.  But you're saying it's going to take them up to a year or  
more to fix a feature I _imagine_ loyal users are clamoring to  
change.  To me extensible groups is to CMS what markup code is to a  
wiki.  How can you really expect to manage "system" content if you're  
limited in how many categories you can shove your users??  Thus I  
consider Joomla! to be fundamentally broken, since fixing that core  
expectation requires breaking the package.

Even PmWiki -- not a CMS although I'm often fooled ;) -- doesn't  
limit the number of groups you can create.  I find the basic  
assumption that people need a fixed number of user groups to be short- 
sighted, and having to break the core to change it dangerous.

Crisses