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A matter of time...

Authored by: Anonymous (Anonymous User) on Wednesday, May 08 2002 @ 09:12 pm EDT

I\'m not a programmer, but I\'ve done a lot of Web stuff, professionally on a producer level, working with programmers, mark-up \"experts\", artists, and also on my own and freelance. And in the last six months, I\'ve LITERALLY looked at, demoed and test installed, practically everything open source and freeware in CMS/Weblog/Web portal, ecommerce, BBS, List Managers, etc. I can tweak and modify Perl from common sense, and now PHP. For the last four months, I\'ve been running a managed server, from scratch as far as knowledge: RH Linux/Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and on...Plus a RealServer. Using Webmin, then increasingly the shell, I\'ve set up seven virtual domains, some name-based, some with dedicated IPs. I\'m now getting round to security <g>, reading CERT-type stuff, and starting with the preinstalled stuff like Tripwire, PortSentry, both running, PAM, ipchains and iptables firewalling (just figuring out).

I mention all this brcause there is definitely a growing group of \"semi-tech\" people like me, and it definitely relates to OSS and computing in general, and to Geeklog and plugins by definition. I\'m kind of like a jack of all trades, but that used to mean a dabbler, \"master of none\", handy when the going wasn\'t too tough. But in the digital world context, same as in music, entertainment, elsewhere, the line between producer-consumer is a blur. Access to highend gear is easy - pay $10 to see a first-run movie, go home and continue editing your own movie on a $5K DV set-up... Same way, if I can run a server, install packages like RH/Akopia Interchange, all with common sense and an (unused) safety net of a managed hosting staff on a $200/mth account, I\'m more than an \"end user\", I\'ll have technically practical but end-user oriented, detailed ideas and opinions that, as a developer, I\'d implement in a minute myself (and share ;>). But most \"developers\" - from my support board experience and from doing docs - still have a hard time dealing with - SEEING - the line between enthusiastic or whining \"newbies\" and pushy users, and this semi-tech class.

I can\'t remember why, specifically, but around three weeks ago, relooking at a dozen or so portal/*nuke/whatevers, amd picked Geeklog, and, a bit different, but for, in the end, content sites, something called Ariadne (Zope-like but different?). Last year, I played around with PHP-Nuke 5.x, a few months into the Post-Nuke fork. I switched to Post, changing every two weeks at the time, but saner it seemed in design approach. Still, I found their \"plugins\" still mostly other programs wrapped in the interface. I BELIEVE (hope) the Geeklog idea is serious integration, more than just one-stop log-ins. Reading the intro stuff, that\'s what interested me.

A plugin like Static Pages, a utility, is obviously tight with the core. But, say, links, should be available everywhere, like, writing a story, I should be able to tag related sites from the Links library, and extract links to the library from stories, like email addresses to an address book. Stuff like that...not overkill, just the real world usability essentials.

So, Geeklog is a lot quieter a site than, of course, the *Nukes, but also a fair number of OSS stuff, all the way to EZPublish, or Metadot (in some weird licensing game, it seems), all that German gear, on and on. That concerns me in principle - OSS dev activity I look at as a big deal, because I\'m relying on enough of a base to get things fixed and moving forward (I contribute my share, whenever possible, I just don\'t code...). But Geeklog seems worth the chance, even if quiet now... A feeling?

The bottom line point is, when someone says that Geeklog is the choice of geeks, which geeks are they? \'Cause, I\'m using it - and will know pretty quick if something goes south and bounce. I would whip up plugins if I could script \'em. I could also suggest stuff, but that\'s a limited game unless you can do something about it. If I have a particular opinon or plugin idea, I\'d spec it quite precisely, as I would if I (shudder - paste \"corporate\" experience) was working with programmers. who at least as often as not, in a design role, shouldn\'t be.

This is kinda open ended, and runs long because I\'m just figuring out how describe what in a few months will be obvious.

If Geeklog can recognize dev geeks from the, dunno, deployment geeks, from yhe users, that\'d move things along. A little vague, yeah, but only until it\'s nailed down.

My buck-fifty!

A matter of time...

Authored by: Anonymous (Anonymous User) on Thursday, May 09 2002 @ 04:38 am EDT

hy. imho your script is just not \"clean\". wich means:

too much functions
not enough toughts put into the gui (example below)
too much bugs (example below) - on a visit at your homepage i just notify there every time again some bugs.. wich is terrible.

then: is your scripts acceptance growing? i mean, YES it\'s getting bigger and there are more users, but those users aren\'t geeks at all (at least what i saw). they mostly used the first skin.. some changed the colors, but noone used it as a real tool, like you could see at the b2-blog example pages.

for example i just wanted to register, then gave username, emailadress, and tryed to register. that gave me 2 boxes: the first wich meant there was an error, and the second where you wrote (in red, wich attracted my attention so i didn\'t read anything other because red means: this is the main action, the most important) there will be an email wich will be sent to my adress - even if this isn^t true, as there was an error.

and please, use smarty as a template system (and more). :)

however, cu, raphb
--
+url: http://raphb.ch/

A matter of time...

Authored by: Tony on Thursday, May 09 2002 @ 08:28 am EDT

Too many functions? Where\'s the fat? How can we trim it? Just saying a blanket statement like that without concrete examples is of no use and doesn\'t help us.

Not enough thought put into the GUI. Well, I\'m not the GUI master but I think a few of our developers who bust their asses to make great skins would disagree. Your example was nothing merely than a suggested tweak. As for your preference for smarty...it\'s the coke vs. pepsi thing. To address templates more specifically, though, we are moving all our templates to the DB allowing admins to remotely change the look and feel without need for shell access.

Yes, Geeklog is growing. If you hang out in our IRC channel or check the mailing list you\'ll see a lot more activity than, say, a year ago. Also, we\'ve gone from a solo development act to a real team and I think the quality of Geeklog shows it. Are we bug free? No. Will be ever be? No. But having more people using it in testing situations and thinking critically about the application will only help make Geeklog even better. (Thanks to all of you that help)

I\'d like to address support. I have been exposed a number of open source projects and I think a unique feature of Geeklog is our ability to provide support in a number of way including live support in the chat room. 90% of what people think are \'bugs\' aren\'t bugs at all but, rather, configuration issues or problems stemming from not reading the INSTALL document.

Finally, documentation. There is a big effort underway to provide accurate and complete documentation both at the end-user level and the development level. You can expect drafts of the documents out in the very near future.

Sorry, this is a bit off topic. But I wanted to address your concerns/issues.

---
The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.

A matter of time...

Authored by: Anonymous (Anonymous User) on Thursday, May 09 2002 @ 11:00 am EDT

I\'ve never seen such great open-source support.
I\'ve emailed the list nearly 15 times, and Tony or Dirk or someone usually responds within an hour. (Even to my stupid questions).

A matter of time...

Authored by: Anonymous (Anonymous User) on Thursday, May 09 2002 @ 10:15 pm EDT

dirk is cool

A matter of time...

Authored by: MLimburg on Friday, May 10 2002 @ 03:45 am EDT

Nahh, MLimburg is cool. Ooooh, maybe I should have logged off before I wrote this ..

In regards to the \'too many functions\' comment above ... cope. You\'re not the only person the app is written for. Take out or turn off what you don\'t want. And the oh so bad news is, we\'re not finished yet.

Okay, now for the \'bugs\' statement. EVERY software app has bugs. We don\'t hide ours, we fix them. We welcome the reports so we and others know of them, to avoid or fix them. We could hide the reports by not putting them on the front page. We could refuse them, and push all bug reporting through the bug-tracker. We don\'t. And if you bothered to read beyond the initial blurb, you may find that a good portion of these bugs are a) people who have a misconfigured environment or b) don\'t RTFM.

GL isn\'t perfect, not yet. It does, however, work and work pretty bloody well.

Now if there IS a problem, a SPECIFIC problem, then define them and send them in. Quit the blanket statements and HELP the project.

Me Cranky.

---
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.

A matter of time...

Authored by: Anonymous (Anonymous User) on Friday, May 10 2002 @ 11:38 am EDT

Any plans to add built in forums? Private messaging between members? I think if geeklog had features that phpnuke didn\'t even more people would use it and create plug-ins & hacks for it.

A matter of time...

Authored by: Tony on Friday, May 10 2002 @ 12:58 pm EDT

Yes, we do have plans in the works for forums and we have a half functioning gallery component we will be pushing out too. Private messages are easy and may even be out with the next release.

---
The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.

A matter of time...

Authored by: Anonymous (Anonymous User) on Friday, May 10 2002 @ 02:56 pm EDT

Cool, just one question, any good place to learn php?

A matter of time...

Authored by: Tony on Friday, May 10 2002 @ 02:59 pm EDT

php.net, phpbuilder.com, irc.openproject.net in #php and devshed.com

---
The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.

Thanks(nt)

Authored by: Anonymous (Anonymous User) on Friday, May 10 2002 @ 03:13 pm EDT

no text

A matter of time...

Authored by: Anonymous (Anonymous User) on Monday, May 13 2002 @ 05:44 am EDT

there is something i think i didn\'t adress yet. we need to believe you. you may look through your archive, but you allways announced a new version within this week, \'n\' then it came out 2 weeks later.

concerning the bugs, you are the only one where i find so much bugs in a short amount of time. you make more functions before cleaning out bugs of the older ones.

YES you do not hide the errors, but do you know any other known software in v. 1.3 where you allready got bugs after a simple bad login and then a right login? hey this is SO BASIC!

then the installation you did, hey this is just amazing full of bugs! it shows me 10 times \"x... done\" (and everywhere messages and errors the compiler wrote) and if i look after the directory there\'s just NOTHING done!

YES everywhere are bugs but if you see 5-.. php errors you just don\'t feel enough confident to give your tool the confidence I need. hey, this tool will holds lot of time effort!

btw, it\'s just impossible to install geeklog in a subdirectory.

Too many functions? Where\'s the fat? How can we trim it? Just saying a blanket statement like that without concrete examples is of no use and doesn\'t help us.

>Not enough thought put into the GUI. Well, I\'m not the GUI
>master but I think a few of our developers who bust their
>asses to make great skins would disagree. Your example
>was nothing merely than a suggested tweak.

no, just no. i am talking about the design, not the styles. yes your pages looked and looks good. but you have to put the buttons where we expect it. greatest CMS IMHO: freshmeat.net.

>As for your preference for smarty...it\'s the coke vs. pepsi
>thing.

ehm, maybe. BUT, it\'s coke smelling like kokain not having sugar and beein\' nearly free ;) i mean, you will maybe think about why a php.net coder (!) is working too on it..

>To address templates more specifically, though, we are
>moving all our templates to the DB allowing admins to
>remotely change the look and feel without need for shell
>access.

ok, it\'s coming, but as it sound\'s you even can\'t install a simple theme in v1.3 without shell!!

>Yes, Geeklog is growing. If you hang out [..]

i\'d say, a growing software is a software wich is used by much people. actually, i haven\'t seen ANY geeklog site wich really USES geeklog (!). they just installed it, put on some posts, changed colors, but haven\'t really adapted the software. but not having it adapted more means to me they don\'t really need such a tool, they don\'t get enough visitors, ..

concerning a PHP tool i mostly would say using it means you use the code and adapted it so much you can\'t see it\'s this script. look at the powered by b2 (use google) list: THIS is what i means with adapted! they use the script!

greets, Raphael
--
+url: http://raphb.ch/

Hmm?

Authored by: Dirk on Monday, May 13 2002 @ 01:52 pm EDT

Excuse me, are we talking about the same Geeklog here? I find it hard to believe ... You CAN install Geeklog without telnet access, you CAN install themes without telnet acces, you CAN install it in a subdirectory, etc. etc. Sorry, you must be doing something wrong here ...

As for sites that use Geeklog - look through the links section here. Yes, you will find many low-traffic sites. But you will also find sites with thousands of users (e.g. MacOS X Hints has more than 10,000 registered users and over 1,500 stories).

bye, Dirk

Man inaccuracies...

Authored by: Tony on Monday, May 13 2002 @ 02:46 pm EDT

Raphael,

There are too many inaccuracies in your statements to even begin addressing them all. But most notable:

1) TheInstall script has been tremendously simplified and only does database operations. If you can\'t get the installer to work, we can usually narrow it down to a) PHP configuration issues or B) misconfigured config.php or C) you didn\'t RTFM

2) yes, you can install Geeklog themes without shell access. It might help in such accusations if you\'d specify a version of Geeklog you feel doesn\'t support this feature

3) Yes, you can install Geeklog into a subdirectory. Again, you should specify an exact version your are complaining about.

If you doubt any of the 3 items above, I\'d be more than happy to give references of installations that prove that my statements are, in fact true.

---
The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.

Man inaccuracies...

Authored by: Anonymous (Anonymous User) on Tuesday, May 14 2002 @ 08:18 am EDT

some seem a little more ungrateful than helpful

i too had a few problems installing GL, but I joined the list, and asked questions, found the search function on the page, and worked my way through it. the developers were very helpful. and i can vouch that if you follow the directions EXACTLY, it should work. i finished the install and could not get rid of three warnings when stories were posted, but i searched the GL list and found out how to turn off the php warnings. now everything is working great.

i\'m also looking forward to the new media plugin i saw tony talkin about somewhere on here.

keep up the good work!

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