Re: [OSCOM] oscom past, present and future

Gregor J. Rothfuss wrote:
> Martin Bähr wrote:
> 
>>On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 03:21:53PM -0400, Gregor J. Rothfuss wrote:
>>
>>>http://www.advogato.org/article/544.html
>>>http://www.advogato.org/article/657.html
>>
>>oh, wow, these are very interesting, thank you.
>>
>>now it would be really interesting if you could write an update to those
>>articles from the present day perspective, and then i am curious to see
>>what we can learn from this for the future of oscom.
> 
> 
> that's easy. i consider these goals to have failed. it is still a pain 
> to migrate content from one OSS CMS to another, a community for CSS 
> skins that work across CMS has not emerged [1], the CMSML effort to 
> bring more transparency into CMS selection has stalled [2], to name a few.

<snip>

> what has changed is that there are now a small handful of OSS CMS that 
> dominate the market. interop by market dominance, as it were. for an 
> outside view of this space, see john newton on ECM commodization [3] 
> (hat tip to seth). and that is a good thing: no one cares about or needs 
> hundreds of broken CMS.
> 
> what also changed, albeit to a sadly small extent, is uptake of things 
> like microformats, that offer immediate benefits to a CMS community, and 
> help interop in their own ways. [4] offers a good example.

Hi,

   I've been quietly watching the proceedings, but didn't feel I had 
anything useful to add up to this point. This thread however made me 
realize that there are some things OSCOM could be very useful for, and
it would be a shame if it would disappear and not at least be replaced
by something else that allows developers of different cms systems to talk.
   First I want to say, I've personally only been to one Zurich Sprint. I
liked the atmosphere, I liked the way we could all take a small peek in
the way other projects tackled problems we all know. I think this 
exchange of ideas and insights was actually the best part of the Sprint. 
It would be a shame if there were no more Sprints. In fact, if all OSCOM
did was help people organize Sprints, I'd still think OSCOM a success. 
It's informal meetings like this which I think are fundamental in 
getting a real community of the ground.
   In that vein, I'd like to offer help in organizing a new Sprint. I 
have good contacts with the local University Student network 
organization, so I might be able to arrange a location for it there. 
That's the University of Twente btw, in Enschede, the Netherlands.

   But about interoperability, I think many of the activities intended
to promote interoperability lacked either real world application or were 
to grandiose in concept. It appears to me that there are some very 
different approaches to content management, which makes it very 
difficult to create a all-in-one interop solution. One example I'm 
thinking of is Twingle. The very real differences in underlying approach 
to how a CMS works, made it impossible for Twingle to succeed. Either it 
supports all or most CMS systems, but in the process is so dumbed down 
that noone uses it, or it only supports a small subset, with the same 
result, or it supports everything and the kitchen sink, but won't ever 
get finished.
   I think microformats, on the other hand, are a good idea. They solve 
very strictly defined problems which can be solved to everyone's liking. 
Things like RSS also became a success by sticking to a simple problem 
with a simple solution, and not trying to do everything. Perhaps if we 
start with such an approach, we can in time build a suite of small 
interop solutions, of which you can decide which to implement in your 
CMS. If OSCOM just kept a list of interop microformats/standards, with 
which CMS implements which of those, I think we'd be getting somewhere. 
Sprints would then be an ideal place to get some help implementing such 
a standard. OSCOM might even provide the facilities and tools to test 
your implementations correctness.
   Something else that OSCOM might play a role in, is keeping people up 
to date on new developments. I know I'm spending a lot of time each day 
tracking a number of blogs, a few del.ici.us tags, and some other 
things. The problem ofcourse is time. If it takes someone, or a few 
people a lot of time in providing this information, it will never work, 
or only for a short time, until the active people get tired of it. So 
what about creating an OSCOM tag in del.ici.us, and stimulating people 
that already scrounge around the internet for new developments which 
relate to (open source) cms systems, to use it? We might even automate a 
section of the OSCOM site to show the latest / most popular links, 
perhaps adding a comment option.
   Anyway, I think that stuff like this, which won't take a lot of time 
for any one person, and potentially offers great rewards for many, can work.

Auke van Slooten
Muze
(http://www.ariadne-cms.org/)

PS. If the goal of Twingle was just to get people to implement support 
for WebDAV, than I think it succeeded. We did implement that, during the 
Sprint, though the finished implementation took a few months extra. It's 
now a standard component of Ariadne.
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