PostNuke

I've learned from this experience that as a collaborative group we can accomplish monumental things. And through the conference my commitment to the PN community is even stronger.

But one thing two keynotes pointed out yesterday is our freedoms to do this are being gradually taken away. I don't want to get into a philosophical discussion but I do want to point everyone in the direction where you can get information to make up your own minds. After this I encourage you to do something about your convictions. Take action. Step up to the plate.

After I heard Richard Stallman tell his story, a story I was familiar with, it hit home. One man started the movement we are enjoying today. Amazing...

Richard's demeanor was humble and his speech was powerful. He left me with a sense that I could make a difference and he encouraged everyone. His philosophy was to just start, regardless of the obstacles and although it may not happen when you think it should, it will happen.

Those who begin a journey at least are going somewhere. Those who decide to sit back because the road looks rough or the mountain too high... well we all know they'll still be in the same place when we get back from the summit.

So step out, start somewhere, make a difference. Even if the difference is through a donation to a cause supporting our freedoms to write, share, and distribute GNU licensed software.


I'll post another update soon .... :-)

Related Links
GNU's Not Unix

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Action Alerts


Related Articles
What Have You Done For Freedom Today? published on O'Reilly Network

Related Weblogs
Richard Stallman: Where This All Came From by Aaron Swartz

Footnote: 1

Postnuke is a server-side scripting system, which stores its content in a database (MySQL, also open-source and free). It allows contributors to post articles, comments, and photos using their web browser. Pages are generated on-the-fly by the server, which uses the PHP scripts to load the appropriate information from the database.

I have had to learn some PHP (a server-side scripting language), but the Postnuke community is very supportive and very active. There is an extensive body of multilingual user interfaces and multilingual support. In addition, Postnuke is evolving rapidly. The bottom-line reason why I chose Postnuke is that it had the capabilities I was after, was open-source, and had a large and active support and developer community. Documentation and installation scripts are rapidly improving; not much technical expertise is required to install the system, but more is required to customize it. See www.postnuke.com

Not that I don't have an issue or two with the system, but overall I am very pleased. It allows our website to be truly interactive, and to move from the model of broadcast of OUR TRUTHS to passive recipients, to a learning community or community of practice. The core of Postnuke is a user-authentication system, which is a prerequisite for giving users the power and responsibility of contributing content.

Postnuke evolved from weblogging software, and the default (but customizable) interface favors those people who are familiar with scripted or dynamic sites. However, I feel that Postnuke is adaptable to community-site usage where not all have this kind of familiarity.

Because not all search engines do a very good job of indexing scripted/databased content, and because extensive server-side scripting slows page loading for low-bandwidth users, our site is a hybrid. The Postnuke system is installed in a subdirectory, and our site has a good deal of static html content.

Peter Donovan Enterprise, Oregon, USA

Find out what others are learning from conscious attempts at managing wholes, rather than just positions, agendas, species, problems, or parts: http://managingwholes.com

Footnote: 1

It will be in vBulletin, message forum format

- First, issues, suggestions, and messages will be solicited from the community for 1-2 days, on a common forum (i.e. For all to see). This is 'post only' as we are only looking for issues and suggestions, not discussion.

- Out of these, the most common issue will be extracted, and given their own threads/sub-forum.

- PN Staff will be given the opportunity to address them (as many PN staff as want can address each issue) for 1-2 days.

- After which, the forums will be opened for general discussion and public feedback for another 2-3 days.

After all's said and done, we'll try to summarize and post a digest version for each issue, and if needed, figure out if any issues need to be revisited, and in what time frame.

We hope to be able to hold more and regular such Town Meetings in this format (if it proves successful) on a regular basis.

We were planning to be ready with all the resources this Wednesday (well, that's today), with announcement and requests for submissions starting this weekend (didn't want
to schedule it during O'Reilly).

Please check out the above format, and respond to this announcement with questions, comments or suggestions in the comments below.

Harry

Footnote: 1

The announcement reads as follows:


Greg was the lead developer and founding member of the PostNuke project, the most popular PHP CMS. His vision and leadership helped to grow a community that spans five continents, hundreds of developers and an estimated 50,000 sites running with PostNuke. PostNuke has been downloaded over 500,000 times to date. The PHP community suffered a great loss when Greg passed away suddenly on June 16, 2002.


Greg was up against some very good competition for the award, and let me also take some time to congratulate the other nominees.


Stig Bakken - Core PHP developer and creator of PEAR (PHP Extension and Application Repository)

Bogomil Shopov - Multilanguage PHP support; PurpleRain Contest Manager; author of "Access your Outlook Application using PHP"

Philippe Thomassigny - Leads the Ascend Web Content Manager project

Andrei Zmievski - Core PHP developer, author of PHP-GTK and co-author of Smarty Template Engine


Each deserve a round of applause for their work on and with PHP.

Thanks to everyone in the community that participated in the vote. I am sure to Greg's family, the award will mean quite a bit. I am honored to have worked side by side with Greg for the past year, and if anyone deserved the recognition, it is he.

One thing I found objectionable was the comment that PHP-based community blogs are difficult to install; yet my newbie experience (posted at kairosnews) was that it's much easier than the article implies. Seems ill-advised, too, that author John Hiler suggests Slashcode as a community blog platform to run since it is a bitch to install, written in Perl, and has a much smaller feature set than even the standard PostNuke install, while lacking all the great modules provided by the PostNuke community.

Footnote: 1

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