PostNuke

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PostNuke comes of age: OSCON 2002

Contributed by on Jul 31, 2002 - 10:18 AM




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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