PostNuke

From my perspective, it may be that people have been locked on too tightly to the initial PostNuke vision. That vision was a great general outline, but remember that it was created by a just a few with specific goals for PostNuke. Now, PostNuke has grown to hundreds of developers, each working on their own particular part of the pie, and thousands of users, each with different daily experiences in using the system.

It's rightly so, as the players change, that the project should consider some new directions, look for new input, and invite new major participants. That does not mean that both the past contributions of core developers who have left are not appreciated, and that the future contributions will not be missed; rather, PostNuke is growing in new and exciting ways, re-visioning itself from the experiences and input of all who have come to join PostNuke.

With that in mind, I would like to suggest that those who have been throwing out ideas for revising PostNuke on the different listservs, the PostNuke beta forum, and throughout the various comment boards on postnuke.com, take a moment to post those ideas here and let's all take some time to think about what possibilities for PostNuke might have been missed as Harry works on organizing his development and management team. As most of us can imagine, with the number of people who have left, he needs some time to get things situated. So, in the interest of making this transition time productive by floating new ideas, I'll begin.

All of the focus on Block Layout, Smarty, and Encompass is aimed at a better delivery system for PostNuke content. But the problem that I see is that PostNuke needs a revision of the way that content is entered, stored, and made use within the site. I'd like to begin a discussion for such a change by suggesting that PostNuke needs an XML (or similar) based content publishing engine which most of the modules can use. Instead of having each module has its own input functions, I can image it's a bear to create consistency in user input interfaces.

Now, I'm not a developer, and I know that this idea has problems, but I hope that this suggestion will catch someone else's eye and this suggestion will be the piece that helps to finish the puzzle. And that maybe others of you will post more ideas here so that the community can create the best PostNuke it possibly can. Granted, not all ideas can be accepted and implemented, but by throwing them out there we may help to give someone a new idea that will help to better the project.

And let's avoid the flaming, trolling, revengeful comments about Harry, etc. They've already been scattered across the community a plenty (I've read TONS of them in the last few days). It's time to be productive and show a little patience.

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I would call myself a hack and slash coder, meaning I do what I need, using other modules as examples and worry about the module working rather than the code looking pretty (and trust me it isn’t pretty!).

The advent of .8 causes me a few worries and I’d like to share them with the developers from the point of view of someone who relies on Postnuke. This isn’t me saying what should and shouldn’t happen (man, I’d be lost in the dark ages without you guys!) but hopefully let you see some of the worries larger sites which can’t afford downtime or loss of functionality have. If Postnuke is to become adopted by bigger corporations these are going to be points they will raise.

With each new release of Postnuke, the ‘coding’ changes. And what I mean by this is that modules need to be recoded slightly differently with each release. It wouldn’t be a problem except that a lot of excellent modules aren’t updated for weeks / months / if ever because the original developers are confused by these coding changes. Heck, I still don’t get all the pnadmin apis, and don’t have the time to really sit down and learn.

However, I understand that as the system progress towards it’s goal, each release is going to introduce changes. And you have started a documentation site which is excellent. However, I know if .8 doesn’t support some of my older modules, supported in .714, I’m going to consider not upgrading, and instead just introduce hacks to do what I need, which will make it even harder to upgrade in the long run.

News needs a complete overhaul, and yes I’m glad to see that happening in .8. News is my ‘bread and butter’ so I need it to be able to work overtime, and whilst many would like some of these features, I’m probably one of those ones who needs them all.

First off, I need next page news. I need to be able to visit the front page see the first x articles and be able to click on an image to see the next x and so on. In a site that publishes a lot of news in a day, it’s not as easy as it could be to see older articles. I also need this to happen whether I’m looking at topics or categories. The “view all articles in this category/topic” is a bad idea. Simply because if you’ve got 5000 articles, the user isn’t going to get a pleasant experience

Sections and news really need to be integrated, but it would be nice if they could be grouped together in some way, neither using topics or categories.


I think we need further options beyond topics and categories and let them be user defined. Maybe someone is giving coverage of an event which covers all topics and categories but needs to be lumped together. I wrote a simple little module for this where I have an event name and then assign urls and titles to it… but I’d like to see this integrated into the news submission.

I also think it’s needed to be able to assign an article to more than one topic/category.

It’s difficult to explain my needs in a way people would understand, so I’ll explain it by example of a music site. Each topic would represent a style of music (but hence there could be times when someone releases a mix of hip-hop and western which would need to appear in both categories). Each category would represent a label. And the 3rd option would be akin to a music festival or awards ceremony where I would want to lump articles from multiple topics and categories together.

Some of my articles contain hardcoded links to previous ones. When things changed from being articles.php to the modules format… it caused me no end of problems because I suddenly had loads of dead links. With integration of news and sections please consider that links not only exist hardcoded within the site but on the wider internet as well, so traffic needs to be successfully re-routed with each new version of Postnuke

Next images. This is something that Postnuke is sorely lacking. I know we have modules like Gallery, but I want to assign images to certain articles. For this I’ve written a module I call imagebank… which is nothing special code-wise. I know this could be written better and integration with things such as scheduled articles and other modules is a bit botched. Now when things like this are suggested a lot of people go on about upload facilities. Personally, I don’t have an issue with creating the images and uploading them via FTP (it’s easier on CPU to do all the image manipulation offline), but I’d like to be able to assign images already on my server quickly and easily (maybe even assign a whole directory which Imagebank can now do).

You can see a demo of this here to get an idea of what I’m talking about:
http://www.action-figure.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=4820

And no, I haven’t released it for a number of reasons, the main one being the way it has to be hacked into the core.

Also items such as number of reads information should have the option of being admin only. This takes me an age to rehack. I don’t want my advertisers being able to compare my traffic data with what someone else may tell them/fake.

The collapsible blocks was a brilliant idea, but some blocks should NOT be able to be collapsed. I had to hack that functionality out because I don’t want my readers being able to turn off my advertising! Banner blockers are bad enough.

Now if something could be done with the banners module to allow zoning by topic / module / category, etc… I’d be a happy bunny. I use phpadsnew as a sepereate install and integrated into my theme (with the odd hardcoded block) but it’s not integrated with nuke enough to do the zoning.

I’d like it if the forums and comments were somehow integrated. No idea how this could be done but I do get the feeling that they are very separate entities on the site and hence cross traffic between the modules is very low.

I currently use encompass which I think is an excellent module. I know there is a lot of discussion about blocklayout vs encompass but to me the strength will be in Postnuke being able to use both… it gives me a choice and allow me to select whichever suits my needs best.

Also, everything possible needs to be done to make Postnuke as optimized and as scalable as possible. I want to ensure that whether I have 20 or 20,000 articles the difference in loading speed is as minimal as possible. Whilst my site isn’t hosted on anything grand, it does have it’s own dedicated server, and has got to the point that it really, really struggles. The bloat is to such a level I am now seriously considering moving to another CMS if things don’t radically improve in .8

Apologies if this seems like a long list of I want, I want, I want. I just feel that these are important generic features any large site which depends on Postnuke needs and I felt that by contributing it might share some ideas with you. I truly appreciate all the hardwork the developers do, and wish I had more time, and better coding knowledge to contribute more to the project


Adrian Faulkner

I will state it for the record now that my contributions to the post nuke project have been few and far between. What development I have done has been on a purely personal level for various websites I have created.

The question I bring before the council is this. Is all the current change actually required?

Having worked in IT for many years I see what is happening right now as a very bad sign. I've seen this happen before, the change of power, the change of perception, the change of ideas, all culminating in the downfall of a project. For the moment, what we know has been hidden behind smoke and mirrors, for all we have seen is a "revamped" website, a much needed forum improvement, and a change of leadership with promisses of new information forth comming.

Do we have to do all this?

For really we need to ask rather is what is a CMS. Are we now developing a "Community Management System"? or rather a "Content Management System"?

From reading the old "vision" which was put down in writing after the creationg of the post nuke project, it would appear at this stage we should be looking at the following items:
A revamp of how content is presented, allowing greater control over placement, organization, language control, and future W3.org compliance.
A revamp of how content is managed and displayed, resulting in the clear definition of the "Sections", "Reviews", and "Articles" areas, improving how HTML is handled, providing improved organization and more flexibility in presentation, and ensuring that the content can be more then just a simple "BLOG".
A basic pass through of all "Core" modules to ensure compliance with the pnAPI and that their output is being passed to the proper functions so that display designers can work w/o fear of a core module not displaying properly.

Yet oddly enough, though it is written this work is either being done behind the scenes, with very little coverage to the public, or rather it is not being done at all, rather being stoped and hindered to permit this change of office.

From the outward apperance, the new "core" group now wish to turn this "Content Management System" into a community management system. Why?

An older man then myself once told me this on my first day at work. "It is a fool who believes that they are good at all things, when infact they are truly good at none." and I see that ever more prevalent here. The "Core" team has done excellent work. They have provided the postnuke project with a solid BLOG interface, they have provided those among the community with the ability to create programs that interface with their project and provide extra functionality, and have left the new management with a stable, functional product.

Thus I ask again, Council and Public, What are we building? Do we build now, from this point, a "community management system" or rather a "content management system" as was written in the beginning?

And if we are not changing our views from the original ideas, then why all the extra work to turn something which works, into something different, when we could be improving on the product rather then the presentation.

Just my 2 cents.
NB

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I am kind of sad how many users reacted negatively upon the new design, because postnuke is still a free GPL project and Harry and many others are spending their free time on designing and organizing the whole community. I think some people interpret the vision and goals and just complain because things are just not as they thought they should be.

Those who know the perfect plan to get the wishes of over 10.000 postnuke users under the same hat, should let the dev team know.

The site isnt perfect yet, but please keep in mind that we pulled the whole site together from in just 5 days.

Please respect that and rest assured that things will be changing and improving as we move along.

Some issues that came up :
- Navigation issues are worked on and will be improved as we see it necessary.
- There will be a global help system or help page available to help navigate and understand the changes made.
- For those complaining about modules used that won't be part of the release, I have to say the old site used third party modules as well, those were just not used for the site navigation.

I can tell you that the navigation module and the bookmark modules will be available to the community. Concerning the phpBB 2.0 Module, it's not the forum of choice concerning a postnuke release, its the choice for the new support forum. PostNuke wont be bundling any new modules in the
core release.

So how should a newbie know what potential PostNuke has, if the main site is not showcasing some third party modules. Ok, lets tell newbies to surf the net to find out what PostNuke can really do. Mmm, not so right for me, but I am happy with what ever the community decides ;)

- The beta site doesn't use encompass and it runs using the standard PostNuke Theme System.
- About PostNuke being a real cms: Users complain about postnuke reverting to a blog and leaving the
cms route, interresting :) PostNuke can either center on the user and the community wishes, or start working on a corporate solution, but has to listen to themselves. So why the confusion lately about postnuke becoming an app system ? (Self-explanatory !)

I know that most of you are confused about all the current changes and the leaving of many core dev team members. PostNuke is reorganizing and will continue to follow the roadmap and visions that it was build on. Harry will be outlining that soon, but that needs time.

Again thanks for all the help and ideas. And please stop flaming and shouting over things again and
again. PostNuke wont flourish and live on, if we dont work together and respect the work that others do.

The PostNuke community is like a big family for me, which includes quarrels among those belonging to it, but there should always be space to get things cleared and worked out again.

Thanks and power to the community.

Alexander Graef aka MagicX
webmaster@portalzine.de

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