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I'm pretty much a PN developer, but was wandering around the site today and thought I'd say hey... so, hey!
I was actually wondering how many mods were available for MDP and then stumbled upon a couple of my past modules (About, Mission, FileShare) ported to MDP. Cool, thanks guys...that was a pleasant surprise.
I was also wondering if MDP will be porting the v4b libs into the core? I checked out the devdocs, but didn't find any clues... I'm particularly wondering how tough it would be to create the 2 platforms of any given module. (Are any mod-devs doing that currently?) At PN, we've been using the libs for awhile and I have to admit, in terms of module building, it seems a bit like cheating because so much work is done by the libs now...it's really awesome! It's caused me to dust off some old projects even.
Can someone elaborate on what the future holds for 3rd party mod-devs in terms of the API? That would be great!
Thanks,
- John
TiMax Project Manager
Joined: July 31, 2003
Posts: 1560
Location: Quebec - Canada
Posted:
July 25, 2007 - 04:16 PM
Hello John,
your are right and I agree with you, can be a nice dream to have a common libraries, rules etc, but like when I proposed several time ago to merge PN and MD projects in one i received negative response, when happened to merge or cooperate with modules developement we received negative response, sometime for my company i need also commercial ($$) development for some special modules, integration etc, and I have received negative answer also with that, I'm waiting other reponses about collaboration in developement, I still don't know if that happened because just some people hate me or MAXdev staff, still don't know today why that happen
But you are right, me too I asked myself several times, why MD dev's develope a module then PN dev's convert it, then PN dev's write or develope a module and MD dev's work to convert or develope it ..... why we need to re-invent a wheel ?
I've read something avout v4b libs but I don't know them, maybe I will look them in next days, sure that can be nice to have some common libs, rules, api etc but like I wrote before I suppose someone don't want it, also with next PN 8 I suppose MD and PN code start to be more far.
About our future I can tell you something, maybe other people can tell you more, maybe our core developer, you know we are a small staff so we can't do lot of things, anyways some future steps:
In next days we plan to release a new MDPro version 1.082 with several code optimisations, install and upgrade procedure revised, some security fix's, new functions like horizontal menu administration from control panel, new online guides, new media plugin to Tinymax module to manage video's, flash and media files, with upload, explore and preview feature, some W3C output cleaning and other things
This week we will start with new MDPro 1.085 with a big improvement in content management, we are working to remove our old News module, Topics module, Categories, News blocks, AddStory, SubmitNews module that because with MDPro 1.085 we will introduce a 100% new News extended module, able to manage news, site content, topics, categories, publications, expirations, archiviations news and content, use of ajax to administer it better, upload features, all templated and lot of other features, that can made MDPro more small and more powerfull
Then later we are developing MD 1.1 core, new core more small, fast and with clean output, maybe Luca can answer better about it.
We have introduced Autorender module to help thirdy party dev's with module development, yes we still have problems to write dev's documentation specially in english, we need help with that , Autorender can support all Autotheme commands and then we added smarty, so dev's can decide to develope module templated for Autotheme, smarty or both sure we need and we plan to improve it and made layout developement easy for all.
Also, DMiranda is working around integration with this forum and a new dev's mailing list, we hope in this way to involve better some other dev's in our developement.
So, in conclusion I can say you that, we are open, we are available to contribute, collaborate, cooperate in any way, maybe in future " if someone don't stop us another time" we can found a nice way to collaborate
_________________ TiMaxMAX s.o.s.Fantasia e dinamicità Italiane, qualità e servizi Canadesi Web Services, hosting ed housing professionali
csipiemonte Lead Developer
Joined: July 31, 2003
Posts: 66
Location: Turin Italy
Posted:
July 25, 2007 - 07:43 PM
I do not know about v4b libs either, can someone post a reference to them?
Thanks
alarconcepts MD user level 1
Joined: Mar 24, 2004
Posts: 15
bannato
Posted:
July 26, 2007 - 04:00 AM
TiMax, thanks for your lengthy reply. The direction of PostNuke is that of an application framework. Of course, this has been the goal all along, but much time and energy has gone into slimming the core to necessities and placing other modules into "Value Added" status...which essentially means that one can pick and choose their installation based on their own needs and leave out any fluff that would essentially be removed after the fact. (The full package will still be available though, from what I can tell.)
I guess the negative response you saw before when mentioning to combine efforts stems from human nature. Some will always want to collab, where others will always want to build in-house.
As you mentioned, I too need to make a monetary return on work done; we can't all work for free forever, after all. I initially came to the MDP community a few years back to announce a commercial ($5) AutoTheme Tutorial that I'd authored. The document was high quality, but wasn't all that well received (publicly) within the MDP community. It could have been that I was charging a fee ... it could have been that I was an outsider ... it could have been that I had little public name to guage by... but I definitely understand your feelings that the community is divided. ...and yes, it does seem crazy that modules keep converting back and forth when the underlying APIs were so similar. By your description, it seems that MDP does indeed plan to move in the same general direction as PN and it's a shame there are not more concerted efforts between the many CMS platforms, at least to ensure the security of end-users if nothing else.
I was hurt in an accident a few years ago and it's given me much time to read. So, read the code is what I did... And then things really started to click for me, so I decided to take the Zend PHP Super Course, which helped a great deal in terms of solidifying my 'name' in the community through the knowledge gained. Unfortunately, due to the accident, now I have substantially less time to program. But with the introduction of the v4b libs, I see now that some of the modules that I'd previously worked on, rather than being obsolete, just needed a bit of cut/paste alteration to make them viable once again. It's my goal to take such titles public; commercial or non, I have not yet decided, but they have become a hobby that I enjoy in my spare time.
After seeing a couple of my modules offered for download here, it makes me want to revisit MDP to find out if maintaining dual platforms is going to be viable based on the time that I do have available. I was actually surprised at your mention that MDP had a small staff...I was under the impression that the core team was quite large indeed! I understand the need to fork at times, but it sure does make more work for the 'outsiders' such as myself who aren't emotionally attached to any particular system. I look very forward to seeing the new version(s) of MDP as well as PostNuke, (as well as Joomla, WordPress, Typo3, etc...) You never know when you're going to come across some gem of a technique!
But above everything else, I am glad to see the open attitude toward collaboration and contribution that you've expressed!
csipiemonte, I suspect the most information on v4b libs will be available at openstar.postnuke.com. Using the libraries, PostNuke has a very intuitive object model with which to program. It's been a tough sell on many 3rd party devs...for it essentially requires the developer to think in terms of objects, which has not historically been the case with module development. But once we 'got it' and started understanding classes more, you start to wonder how you ever got by before! After learning more about classes through the new libs, I penned the "PostNuke Recovery Console" (PNRC), a secure and professional replacement for the legacy PSAK! Perhaps it could also be converted for MDP. The knowledge gained through the libs is invaluable...but most notably (for mod-devs) is that what used to be a clunky procedure of database interaction involving many lines of code, has been replaced with elegant one-liners. The new libs offer far more than that, but that one feature alone is very standoutish for those of us who grew up on pnHTML, the Template/Example modules and 'hand-coding' in general.
csipiemonte Lead Developer
Joined: July 31, 2003
Posts: 66
Location: Turin Italy
Posted:
July 26, 2007 - 08:08 PM
OK.
I'll add some personal consideration.
Tool like MD, PostNuke or anyway products that come from that baseline pay the price of having a long story behind.
Object programming in PHP was not possible at that time and many did not have the skill to work that way. This is not a fault is just how things evolved.
Trying to modify the core of a product like these is really complicated for the following reasons (not particullary tied to MD,but, in my experience, in many OSS communities):
1) there must be the committment of all the developer community because all will need to "learn" the new way of programming and agreeing on the new style otherwise people will leave and the product will suffer anyway.
2) Making changes requires using new libs and each time you propose a change or a new thing many start complaining the the one they knew was better or they do not have time to learn another lib and (I believe that nothing is worst of using a lib in a bad way you end up messing much code); so again some may leave.
3) community must decide to work on the product because there will be two lines of development and someone will have to mantain the old while some others will work on the new, but it require discipline and commitment
Since communities are not business companies is sometimes difficult to plan a roadmap since nobody is obliged to work on anything, but will work on what he needs or like. Some are into because they make money from using the tool, so they gain something and I believe that the need of these people is the most important to take into account, many oahters work on the product for passion, interest, but do not derive money from it, they are an imporetant part of the community because give the breath it sometime need, but can be less motivated in big changes.
The real problem between money and open source projects is that people tend to look for free stuff around and is difficult to make someone pay for something tied to the product; it's a behaviour we also have so we are part of the problem.
The money comes from selling the service that is the web site to a customer that really do not care wheather you use MD, Joomla, plain HTML, but will never buy a manual or thing like that.
So either the product manages to rise to the highest level like Apache web server and you can print manuals and have people buy it or in a dimension like the actual of MD (maybe in a future ...) I believe that we will not be able to have success on that way (but that doesn't prevent others to try to try it and we'll support him).
In the technical part I agree that an object orientation solution could help a tool like MD to be easiest to develop, install, mantain.
We tryed with a first 1.1 branch to apply that solution, but is a long way to run and will take time. We always welcome people that want to share some road with us.
Luca
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Posted:
July 25, 2007 - 08:51 AM
