PostNuke

Many of you undoubtedly saw the 'Open Letter' which was recently posted (how could you miss it, seeing as how it was posted everywhere), and I can assure everyone that the misunderstading at the core of that article has been thoroughly cleared up, after a lengthy IRC session. Talk about a weird homecoming... :-) (and, for what it's worth, I have never seen a weirder 'campaign' angle than the 'Free PostNuke' buttons that were part of that 'open letter'.




In context to this original situation, I would like to take a line here to extend special thanks to those of other projects, who have posted common sense messages in support - Thanks, Zoom of Envolution, and thanks MikesPub of Xaraya.






I've also noticed that some issues have been raised about potential developments and moves towards a closed development model - this is simply not true, and I can assure you that this won't happen. To those that recall both the genesis of PostNuke, as well as the recent splits into two forks a while back, the openess of the development model was at the core of all of them. We split from php-nuke mainly because of the closed development that it's author advocated. Now, why would we want to replicate that same mistake on here? I believe someone aptly stated "Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it", and while this certainly holds true for many of life's situations, it is nowhere more true than in open source projects.




So, rest assured, PostNuke will always remain *free*, and development will always remain open. That's my pledge.




Now, this doesn't mean that just about ANYONE will and can receive CVS access, and that we can have a wild committ-fest of anyone with a 'net connection. In order to maintain a certain level of sanity, development, and particularly commits to the CVS *must* be done in a controlled, orderly fashion. This means that while I advocate keeping CVS always open for anonymous check-out, and welcome submissions of fixes and patches, we *must* keep the ability to commit to core developers to prevent insanity and chaos (we've had that at one point in the past). We're working out a system that should be able to accomodate most needs. Stay tuned.






We've also had a couple of changes in the management, the absence of both of which will be felt, as PostNuke owes both a tremendous deal. Effective immediately, both Neo and MagicX have left the project to hopefully pursue life outside of the stresses that this project brings with it. Neo and MagicX were responsible for much of the enhancements, infrastructure, and site redesigns that you've witnessed after the Xaraya split, and they masterfully carried the weight of the project on their shoulders during my hiatus. As you also may know, Neo was the mastermind behind the Phoenix Rendering Engine (based on SMARTY). I fully understand the reasons behind the departures (the words 'burned out' come to mind), and while I wish them well, I also want to assure them that any help will always be only an e-mail away, and that both will be welcome back here in a heartbeat.






One of the changes is also that the NOC will not be going away, but it will change servers, and this change is going to happen this weekend. In fact, I plan on doing a minor and major overhaul of the server and infrastructure, adding a bit here, a tweak there.






Lastly, we're also readying a new security fix release, and have several incremental updates to the 0.723/0.724 codebase planned, to tide existing installations over with asked-for enhancements and minor fixes until arrival of 0.8 (née 0.725). Stay tuned for more news on those.






Finally, there will be a couple of follow-up articles, including 'openings' for help with some of the stuff planned for the immediate future. Like I said - Stay Tuned!




-Harry




P.S. Oh yeah, and for those wondering "Where the hell have you been all his time???", let me just give the short of it being "Sometimes life just takes over, and you have to beat it back down into submission again..."