Chapter 1: CMS and history of MDPro

Chapter 1. CMS & history of MDPro

At the very beginning in 1998 there was Thatware, from which the 30 year old Italian-Venezuelan Francisco Burzi developed the Nuke Web Portal System, an open source CMS (content management system), and in summer 2000, the first version of PHPNuke 1.0 was released. This product rapidly attracted a large amount of developers. Even so, many forks (a fork means a variant) were derived from this system or variants of it within a couple of years, including such forks as PostNuke, DarkPortal, Iscouter, PlanetNuke, Xoops, etc.

In the spring of 2001 PostNuke was released, developed by a community composed of over a hundred programmers, with new features, such as being multilingual, new built-in blocks, new layout, and some safety features (the safe-mode). One year later, in 2002, from PostNuke, eNvolution forked, a fork of a fork, with many developers leaving the PostNuke community. The idea was to make the system more customizable/editable/hackable for developers and webmasters without coding the core: the big must was modularity. The system has to allow an easier customized installation of single components, an easier upgrade from other versions, and the possibility for third party developers to work independently on creation of new modules. The site layout has been structured in models or visual templates that allow a simple and flexible building of the themes and look of the site with few clicks of every part of the system: blocks, modules, and pages. New features were built in to the system, mostly by new developers from the Italian community, such as integration with Oracle database, some new modules as Envo-News and Envo-Radio, etc.

In summer 2003 Massimiliano Tiraboschi aka TiMax, one of the founders of eNvolution, started the MAXdev Project, that immediately involved a large part of the most active members of the eNvolution and PostNuke communities, and always more professionals and skills coming from various branches, such as universities, education, graphics, journalists, writers, technicians, businessmen, etc. The target is to supply professional and customized services for the needs of all type of customers, by integrating content management with e-learning systems, with e-commerce, with ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and much more.