My previous post, a long time ago, I elaborated a bit on the difficult choice between ImpressCMS and Xoops. As I read in the ImpressCMS forums, ‘A line is being drawn in the sand’, and these two CMS packages are each going their separate ways, without regard for compatibility between one another. That means one has to make a choice, and recently making that choice became much more difficult due to the evolving nature of the projects.

All is quiet on the ImpressCMS front…

Where ImpressCMS has been showing the best progress right after the split from Xoops, the situation seems to have been reversed. The Xoops website contains some high-profile messages (the return of former key contributors, mergers again with spin-off branches), while the ImpressCMS site is eerily quiet. This might entice people to switch again to Xoops, and I can’t blame them.

I joined the iCMS development team a bit more than a month ago, in order to have Subversion repository access. As an insider, I have seen what is going on in ImpressCMS development. I must say it’s quite strange that Xoops and ImpressCMS are doing the same things, but for their own platform. Xoops has announced that there is a blue movement going on, which aims to rewrite as much modules as possible using the Xoops Foundation classes. 

At the same time, the ImpressCMS 1.2 alpha release is being prepared, and a huge effort has been done to rewrite as much functionality with IPF classes (ImpressCMS Persistable Framework), performing the same functionality as the Xoops Foundation classes. The iCMS developers are ‘Eating their own dogfood’, as they say. The major difference is that there is no site-wide announcement before the first alpha version is delivered, contrary to Xoops.

Frameworks

ImpressCMS defined the IPF (ImpressCMS Persistable Framework) as the basic class structure that would be the foundation for any development.  The IPF still builds on many classes with the ‘Xoops’ name in them, but that will be changed in the future, I’m certain. Once everything is based on the IPF, one can easily change the underlying system internally without breaking everything that is built on top.

 This is all very nice, and good news for the iCMS people, but I’m trying to build a site here. What does that mean for 3mension? Well, the good news is that iCMS will release the first alpha of the 1.2 branch in the following days. That branch is compatible with the imBuilding module, which will make the build process much more straightforward, and much quicker. Developing a module would become possible in a single day, according to people testing it.

The 3mension site will go online in a short while, with the basic functionality available. Most of the community-building addons will not be there yet, but the upload and description will be. In fact, it will be based on a version of wf-downloads. In the meantime, development will continue on the iCMS 1.2 version, where a tailored platform will be created for the 3mension needs.

The near future

I still have lots of work:

• setup the right combination for the wf-download options
• decide on the new look
• find some testers
• look around for community managers (one for each community, which is defined by a specific engine or a 3D tool)
• setup a bug tracking tool that can be used by the tester team.

Much to do, but a lot of the difficult decisions have been taken. Now, all we can do is go forward.

There is much work to be done to get the loose modules working together and the Xoops platform has lost much of its momentum last year during the period of infighting that spawned forks like ImpressCMS, chasing many talented developers away.

I seem to be coping at the moment, but it just seems more work to get to a point where other systems can take you with a standard install.

I installed the DAO class generator from the Xoops modules site. It takes an existing database table, and writes a data access Xoops class that should provide the needed functionality to use the database table in your module. It’s rather old (2004), but it seems to do the job just fine. I couldn’t find posts on the forums with warnings about unsafe or dangerous code provided by the plugin. I’ll keep on the lookout for maybe another generator, but for the moment, this is the one I’ll be using.

I won’t take care of the presentation for these first internal releases. I just want the functionality to be there. Nobody will notice that the page is perfectly integrated in the theme when the functionality isn’t there. The theme and the templates will be started when after a few internal and closed beta releases.

As always, If you are interested in testing the 3Mension site once it starts the closed beta tests, please subscribe on the main 3mension page, which happens to be the only page at the moment.

Unfortunately, setting up a website the way I imagined it, even in its most austere form, was not easy at all. Then the job got a bit in the way too, just to make things more interesting. I didn’t give up though, and I’m slowly building up the framework to run 3mension.com .

Firstly, I’ll build a Xoops-based version. I have most of my PHP development experience with that framework, and I think it will be a good exercise and a valid testcase for developing something other than a standard community site with news posts and a forum. Based on my experience, the decision will have to be made after the first version of the site whether to continue with Xoops, or if other frameworks provide more of the needed functionalities out of the box.

Right now, all I want is to do two things very well:

• Provide an easy and efficient upload experience to publishers
• Make it easy for non-publishing users to find the files they need.

That seems to be two trivial goals, but don’t let that fool you. The word ‘easy’ is not difficult to write in a post like this, but it is not so easy to write the code for that elusive little word ‘easy’.

Right now, there is this blog, and a holding page telling you to wait, and to leave your name and mail address if you would like to be notified of the new and exciting things that are coming in the future.