webworks to opensource its tools
I had a nice chat with John earlier. We‘re considering releasing our tools under an open source license.
We’re doing this for a number of reasons. I think that chief among them is the hope that with many developers (or at least, with more than just myself), we should be able to keep on top of all the modern net tricks that keep appearing – RSS, Ajax, etc. So far, I’ve been doing that myself, but as our CMS, WebME (Web Management Engine) has grown, the effort to keep it uptodate has become trickier.
So, we are planning on releasing the code as open-source while I am still on top of it, so I can help other developers join in on the coding while still working away on it myself.
I’m very excited about this.
A few years ago, we tried this very thing, open-sourcing WebME, but no-one took us up on the offer, and we brought it back in-house.
However; since then, I released KFM, which has developed into a pretty popular open-source project, and I feel that releasing WebME again will work based on whatever OS credit I might have earned from that project.
We are hoping to release our newsletter-management service as well, depending on how WebME does.
I’m very interested to see what other people think of this. I know most of you will not have seen WebME’s admin area, but I think it’s one of the most user-friendly ones out there (even if I say so myself), and will be a boon for developers who want a simple CMS for simple sites – page-based sites with galleries, simple online stores, etc.
i think thats a brilliant idea ! 🙂
mainly just because i want to use the CMS, I don’t know if i’ll be able to contribute much but i’ll try my best!
Thanks Conor.
I think that one way to “ease” people into it, and also a good way of controlling the release in case vulnerabilities are in the code (as mentioned by Paddy on the IE-PHPUG mailinglist) is to release the project in the form of a tutorial. Each article would introduce a new part of the system, and at the end of the article, you could download the entire project to-date and work with it.
That also allows me to rebuild some parts which I’m not happy with, and also forces me to write some bits that are missing (such as an online manual, and an installer).
Thats great news Kae! I remember seeing webme a few times and being impressed! I suppose you know already but there’s a few spelling mistakes on the new webworks site.
we basically pushed our draft version online to force us to get the job done. A more complete site (with spell-checking) will be uploaded tonight or tomorrow.
The first webme article will be written and hopefully completed tonight.