How did your Postnuke career start?
In early 2002 I was looking for a CMS for a Website. After some researches I had to choose between PHPNuke and Postnuke, but I chose Postnuke for the besser concept. There was the API, and the big community that convinced me of Postnuke.
What are your tasks in the pnCore-Team?
I work on pnRender, the Postnuke Smarty implementation. Besides I seem to be the only one to keep an eye on static-docs.
When did you start programming for Postnuke?
My first selfwritten modules are fortunatly unpublished. They are only used internally. But my first steps I did in theming.
How do you work?
Most of my own code I write as a kind of "proof of concept". That is e.g. how "Search Statistics" evolved: The idea is to get a statistic on search queries without any changes in the core structure. The resulting modules was written in a hustle - it still lacks an adequate admin interface...
What is the future of Postnuke?
As some your interview partners already said, Postnuke will become more of an application framework. That sounds much like a buzzword, but there's a lot behind that. Apart from the the
Photoshare integration into
PagEd there's currently almost no cooperation between the modules. The greatest challenge is to offer this kind of mechanisms in an abstract way, so that module developers can use them.
A first step is the hook concept. There should be a lot more hooks available to demonstrate the power of this concept.
What is Postnuke's strength?
The strenght lies in its future. A clean implementation via the API, the development into an application frame and the coming Smarty integration are great oportunities.
The weakness is that Postnuke is quite well documented, but this documentation is hard to find and spread across several sites. The same applies to the modules. The
NOC is well intended alas poorly implemented...
I know you have some "side-project", tell me about them.
You can find my projects at
http://lottasophie.sourceforge.net.
My best-known Modul is certainly the universal comment module
EZComments. I started working on EZComments in connection with my work on the
German Postnuke documentation in early 2003. The idea was to implement a documentation including user comments. Content Express doesn't offer comments, so we had to implement them. With Postnuke's hook-concept it was an easy task to attach the comments.
The
Title_Hack is a way to display "sensible" information in the title of the browser. The hack has become more popular than first expected. Meanwhile there exist title plugins for a number of modules.
Last but noch least I am involved in the maintenance of
My_eGallery. I use this module at my own private site. Several patches and fixes existed for My_eGallery but not centrally available. Patrick (Marsishere) stopped working on MEG so I adopted it and maintain it together with chasm.
The users should keep in mind that my developments often are a "proof of concept". If you find a big, don't keep it - report it in the forum and if anybody changed anything in my modules, I'd like to get it. Feedback is far to rare.
Thank you for the information.