| At one point about 6 years ago we had looked at developing part of the business around using opensource systems like Joomla for collaborative applications ( the push being a frustration with IBM licensing ). We set up some sites for local charities as a way of dipping our toe in the water.
All my spare time ( and more ) is now going into fixing these charity websites that we set up and support for free or for a nominal fee – its a bit of a nightmare really 🙁 The sites are on a version Joomla ( originally Mambo ) which is no longer compatible with the version of PHP that the web hosting provider has upgraded to and they have all fallen over. |
The learning that we took away fairly quickly ( and hence stayed with Domino ) was that managing the core opensource module and the different plugins connected to that module is very difficult, particularly where each project was bespoke
The key issues were :
>>>Upgrades to the core Joomla / Mambo system would sometimes break the separate opensource extensions.
>>>In many cases the upgrade cycle of the extensions lagged behind the core Joomla upgrades.
>>>Backward compatibility was not a high priority in the project with 3 significant changes in architecture.
>>>The opensource project forked at one point ( the Joomla / Mambo split ).
>>>Hacking was a more difficult issue to manage than on a Domino platform
The Joomla project is hugely impressive. What has been achieved by this opensource project is just amazing and I still remember the first time I looked at the Joomla Application Control Panel thinking that if we had been asked to write it from scratch it would have been a