Why Good Open Source PHP CMS Developers are Hard to Find

An interesting read: http://www.hiveminds.co.uk/content/why-good-open-source-php-cms-developers-are-hard-to-find.html

Reading this article makes me appreciate MODx and the community even more. The forum has many helpful members and code is often included. I hope the new MODx is favorably positioned to avoid these potential "gotchas"?

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I read the article but item 2. Doesn’t make sense.

2. Stay away from systems that have no backwards compatibility.

CMS systems should be upgradable but if a CMS is better off with a complete codebase rewrite why in the hell should it be backward compatible with anything. This is why we have Windows Vista people. Ensuring endless support for everything of yore is a waste of resources and allows people to use outmoded,l outdated code. Why do you think there are so many shared hosting cos that only offer PHP4.

Not everything you did yesterday will be compatible with the stuff you do today.

Cheers,

Jay

Quote from: smashingred at Nov 03, 2008, 09:26 AM

I read the article but item 2. Doesn’t make sense.

2. Stay away from systems that have no backwards compatibility.

CMS systems should be upgradable but if a CMS is better off with a complete codebase rewrite why in the hell should it be backward compatible with anything. This is why we have Windows Vista people. Ensuring endless support for everything of yore is a waste of resources and allows people to use outmoded,l outdated code. Why do you think there are so many shared hosting cos that only offer PHP4.

Not everything you did yesterday will be compatible with the stuff you do today.

Though I would agree that we shouldn’t be so attached to legacy ways of doing things, when you have a community of adopters, changing the core framework and invalidating all of the custom code that community has invested in developing for the platform is never the right thing to do. This is why we have Revolution as a stepping stone to a totally new data structure (to support versioning and better content localization) with a lot of backward compatibility built-in, as well as the new API’s to help people get migrated from old way to new way without starting from scratch with everything before they can even make the attempt. Once they learn and begin changing their components to the new way of doing things, then we can further change the core and provide new features without breaking every component that’s been developed for the previous version (the new API’s will help hide the implementation changes moving forward, something we couldn’t do before with direct db access).

I totally agree that you shouldn’t abandon a code structure and cut the legs of every project addon at every turn but the poster’s explanation was odd. It was like he meant that every iteration should work with each previous. I do agree that branching needs to be done in such away to have a stable codebase and major changes are at major turning points in application development.

He made it sound like php devs should build CMSs like Microsoft builds windows. Never moving forward for always looking back to the legacy apps.