I am not prepared to act as any product's champion but my explorations so far have made one thing clear to me, i.e. some of the open source initiatives, like PostNuke, offer valuable design lessons and real-world first class examples of what can be done by community-spirited groups. These groups now appear to be developing the knowledge base, exhibiting the innovation, and providing the design leadership. Perhaps we should be paying greater attention to what they are doing? So if you want an update read on! As readers of my previous articles in this series will realise I'm currently looking at PostNuke, an open-source content management system. PostNuke et al can certainly do weblog type things but PostNuke, like others in this genre, also appear to offer much much more.
My respect for the basic modular architecture of PostNuke and the ilk grows daily.
As users of commercial VLE's will know, a major sales angle by the vendors is that their products can be extended via additional third-party functional components … but, of course, you need to buy into their core product first.
Well here's the rub. PostNuke and the ilk appear to be built completely from open-source components. The standard design of these modules means that adding, replacing, or removing a module isn't rocket science. Within a couple of minutes it's possible to extend the functionality of the core PostNuke modules and have the new function automatically appear in the default menu. There is no complex install procedure necessary; new modules and styles (themes in PostNuke parlance) can be downloaded from a variety of sites and once unzipped their folder structures just need to be moved into the relevant part of the PostNuke directory tree for them to become available to the system. So why do other systems make such a meal of extending functionality?
My earlier articles described how I had replaced PostNuke's default news and article syndication functionality for another richer open-licence product. The new function is now working well and broadly replicates what the Auricle RSS Dispenser does. I then wanted to add online discussion functionality and after a brief visit to the PostNuke new modules site I downloaded and installed pnPHPBB2 an open-source discussion module. Five minutes later I had a functioning discussion module. I also noted that there was a enhancement (or mod) available for pnPHPBB2 which adds the choice of threaded or flat views of the message structure.
I've also downloaded some additional themes (styles) for my prototype PostNuke site and found it remarkably easy to change its appearance radically. This, however, was the source of a painful lesson. A couple of 'rogue' themes actually crashed my nascent PostNuke site, forcing a complete rebuild. Although it only took me ten minutes or so to do this rebuild, my prototype site was mainly devoid of content and had this actually been a 'production' site the loss could have been much more serious. The lessons are: a) backup, backup, backup before installing anything new, such backups should also include the database at the backend of systems like PostNuke; b) test new components on a test server like mine before installing them on a production system.
Now I know commercial vendors are beginning to launch a frontal attack against open-source systems by spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) but what I've found interesting is, that far from killing markets, systems like PostNuke are actually creating new ones. Sure, there's a lot of open source and free themes, modules et al out there, but I also note the presence of fully functional free components as tasters into reasonably-priced enhanced commercial variants. There's a lesson there, but the major VLE vendor's will find this a difficult, if not an impossible, lesson to accept.
I've now moved on to exploring the web landscape for existing PostNuke components which could offer further educational possibilities, but you'll have to tune into next week's exciting episode for that:)
