[pmwiki-users] Meetup? Drupal?

Joachim Durchholz jo at durchholz.org
Sun Oct 1 07:45:25 CDT 2006


Crisses schrieb:
> On Oct 1, 2006, at 5:33 AM, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> 
>> Another limitation is that the hierarchy for texts is exactly two levels
>> deep. (That's just as in PmWiki.)
> 
> I believe this is extensible in PmWiki via cookbook recipe(s?).  Without 
> breaking the core ;)

Not really.
E.g. you can't (easily) limit searches to subgroups. Relative links tend 
to break when moving groups of related pages across groups, or up or 
down the hierarchy.
It's difficult to cover all your bases if you want a real group 
hierarchy. There are even conceptual problems in PmWiki's way of viewing 
groups and pages; these don't matter as long groups and pages remain 
clearly separated concepts, but this distinction doesn't completely hold 
up with hierarchical groups (changes might make it useful to turn a page 
into a group plus a set of child pages, or vice versa - but links from 
the outside should remain valid under such changes).

>> They plan to add both feature next year. Whether plan and reality will
>> match or not, if you need any of these features, Joomla isn't suitable.
> 
> Next year is far too long.  How many people want to wait up to 15 months 
> for something as vital as extensible groups?

Oh, there seems to be a whole lot of people for which extensible groups 
aren't an issue. Otherwise, neither Joomla nor PmWiki would ever have 
gained traction.

>> I'm surprised that Crisses talks about a price for a business directory.
>> Joomla is GPLd, so any reasons you'd need a commercial license for would
>> have to be nontechnical. Actually I don't even see a commercial license
>> offered.
> 
> There are modules offered for Joomla for which you must pay.

OK, these do exist.

 > GPL does not mean FREE.

Sort of.
It means that if anybody has the code, he can pass it on for free. Which 
means he *will* pass it on for free pretty soon.
(It also means that if anybody modifies the code, he can't pass the code 
around unless he does it for free.)

 > And GPL does not mean you can't have proprietary add-ons.

The idea is that certain kinds of extension need to be under the GPL 
while others need not, but the definitions are too imprecise. I'm still 
waiting for an enlightened judge and a technically excellent defendant 
who'd punch holes through this part of (the FSF's interpretation of) the 
GPL.
But that's all on a tangent.

 > See ThunderCart for PmWiki's proprietary add-on -- in this
> case it's hosted -- since it's not distributed to anyone, they don't 
> need to make the source code available.  Most GPL software is offered 
> for free, but free is optional.  When you give someone software with a 
> GPL license you must make the source code available to them.  That's 
> pretty much all it means.

Right. Joomla itself is free, though.

> I didn't ask the core development team to fix the broken group issue for 
> Joomla! so I can't say how responsive the team would be to my needs.  
> But you're saying it's going to take them up to a year or more to fix a 
> feature I _imagine_ loyal users are clamoring to change.

Not really. Most installations don't need more than two levels.
Heck, PmWiki has been unresponsive for loyal user clamoring for 
multiple-level grouping for more than a year, too, and I don't see 
people saying that this seriously devalues PmWiki or something.

 > To me
> extensible groups is to CMS what markup code is to a wiki.  How can you 
> really expect to manage "system" content if you're limited in how many 
> categories you can shove your users??

I think that not all rights are managed through user groups. I'm not far 
enough into Joomla to say anything for sure, but I dimly remember 
something like that users could get rights on a per-group basis or someting.

 > I find the basic assumption that
> people need a fixed number of user groups to be short-sighted, and 
> having to break the core to change it dangerous.

Well, they're aware of the issue and determined to fix it.
The fork from Mambo was just a year ago, and they are just now 
completing a major rewrite of the core.
I'm pretty sure that having arbitrary content groups and 
administrator-definable user groups was one of the things that mandated 
architectural changes. I was on the German Joomla days just yesterday, 
and I saw them cringe whenever "two levels of grouping" or 
"admin-defined user groups" were mentioned in the same phrase as "Joomla 
1.0.x"...

Regards,
Jo




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