PostNuke

I was able to negotiate a very reasonable and acceptable price of $162.50, which includes reimbursment of all fees and expenses of the new registrant. If you wish to contribute, I will keep all monies in my attorney escrow account (as most of you know I really am a lawyer!) and will provide for a public accounting here to ensure that all is accounted for and that the names of those donating will be placed within a public list within an honorarium.

Checks may be made out to Michael M. Wechsler, Esq. and put "Greg Allan ndezign fund" in the comments area of your checks. All correspondence may be sent to me, Michael M. Wechsler (Slinky) at PO Box 237137 New York, NY 10023. Email is slinky@newsguy.com, telephone number is 212-580-6630 should you have any questions.

Ironically... Greg was our treasurer...

Thank you all in advance, especially all of you who lit a cybercandle... we miss Greg and hope to be reminded by the shining example he set for us both as a developer and, most especially, as a truly wonderful person and friend.

Sincerely, Michael aka Slinky

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A beautiful surprise for me, and I spontaneously decided to address the audience with a "thank you" message. Later that night while talking to ActiveState employees, I heard many a tale of satified PostNuke users at ActiveState and elsewhere.

I had come to the convention wondering how the PHP community would react to the PostNuke presence, knowing that PHP-Nuke is banned from the official #php IRC channel because the PHP developers are fed up with the <a target=_top href="http://online.securityfocus.com/search?submit=yes&category=-1&order=DESC&query=php-nuke">constant problems in it. Having had to defend PostNuke due to its similarity in name with a project that "gives PHP a bad name" as one PHP core developer was fond of telling me, I was very relieved when I could clear those misconceptions over a beer.

Increasingly it became obvious that PostNuke is on the map now. Having recently passed 500,000 downloads, it drew a lot of attention not only from the PHP community, but also from PERL people, Apache developers, <a target=_top href="http://www.phpj.com/">Magazine publishers and many others.

The best part of the conference were the informal chats with fellow developers, like Bharat from the <a target=_top href="http://gallery.sf.net">gallery project. Bharat told me how he likes the new PostNuke API, and showed me code of the upcoming 2.0 release. If you are happy with gallery 1.3 (I certainly am), you will positively love 2.0. Look for better integration into PostNuke, a new generic core that could be used for other kinds of downloads, templating, and many other exciting features.

<a target=_top href="http://greg.abstrakt.ch/docs/postnuke_oreilly_2002.pdf">My talk focussed on the lessons that we learned in the past year while coming up with the API. One of the lessons was that while we had focussed on users (having users from day one is a rare privilege for Open Source projects), it only became apparent later that PostNuke could also be an excellent platform for web application development. Hence the title "Special purpose application servers", which had funnily attracted no end of conspiracy theories before the conference.

While talking to people with a wide range of backgrounds, it became increasingly clear that there is a lot of very good existing software out there, and that PostNuke should be made both embeddable into other software (like the excellent PHPGroupWare) and other software be embedded into PostNuke. The energy and excitement in the PostNuke community sometimes blinds us for solutions outside our little sphere of the world.

Interop was a major topic in the speaker lounge, and I look forward to the <a target=_top href="http://www.oscom.org/conferences/sanfrancisco2002/index.html">OSS CMS Conference this fall, which is entirely devoted to it. It was very motivating to see PostNuke come of age, and participate as an equal in the Open Source community. The future newer looked better for PostNuke, and for Open Source in general. (With the important exception that Vanessa already <a target=_top href="http://postnuke.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2064&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0">mentioned)

Gregor J. Rothfuss

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Here's how the town meeting is intended to proceeed:

1.- 2 days of people posting *WELL-WRITTEN*, rational, and non-offensive messages, detailing WHATEVER it is they want to contribute, suggest, or bring to attention.

2.- Strict adherence to netiquette rules is required at all times. In other words, no flames, personal attacks, etc.

3.- Use of descriptive subject lines is mandatory. Posts with 'no subject' or subjects like 'ideas' will not be evolved. Any issues, suggestions, ideas, or ramblings are encouraged.

4.- 2 days by staff to grab the essentials, or most popular issues (there is bound to be redundancy), which will THEN be assigned an individual forum each.

5.- Then, for 2 days, PostNuke staff responds. As many staff as want can respond to each forum issue - but only one response per staff member.

6.- After the staff responses, we open the forums for global discussion for 5-7 days. During this time the public can post respoonses to staff responses, and staff can respond.

7.- After all this is said and done, we will make an effort to summarize the various issues, draw conclusions, and evaluate which issues need a future follow-up.

Note:
[Messages containing disruptive content about irrelevant issues, like about what forum we use, etc... Will either be deleted, or not promoted] - the focus is The PostNuke community, PostNuke and its future, not minutiae...

Footnote: 1

Click on any picture for a larger view.

Drew found a few compromising pictures of Steve online, and created a couple signs. Doug & Drew held the signs up in the airport, much to the amusement of de-planing travellers.



For a closer view of the signs that Steve saw, click either of the links below.



Judy, an airport information volunteer with an intercom was almost convinced by Drew to page "MacGregor the Bad Ass Pimp", but we saw Steve coming up the escalator at the moment she was about to make the announcment.



Steve got quite a kick out of the signs -- we could hear him laughing as soon as he could see the signs.



We found a bar in the airport and began to drink. And talk. And drink... Soon, it was decided that Steve needed to try "Cincinnati Chili", so Doug toddled off to find the airport's Gold Star Chili for Three-Ways. Cincinnati Chili is an odd mixture of meat and spices (rumored to include chocolate and cinnamon) that is unlike any other chili you may have had. A "three way" is spaghetti, chili, and cheese. A five way is spaghetti, chili, cheese, beans, and onions. Doug & Drew eat theirs with a fair amount of hot sauce. Steve liked it, but declared that he needed to "drink more" to really enjoy the three-way.



It was great to meet Steve during his short stay in Cincinnati.