Re: My thoughts on Xaraya

As a professional programmer (15+ years), here's "my thoughts on Xaraya" 
  -- particularly when compared to other CMS or web development 
environments:

1) It almost always works.
2) Aspects that have had trouble in the past are solved quickly in new 
releases.
3) Modules are vetted and never half-baked.
4) Code has great internal documentation.
5) The developer group and newsgroup contributors are helpful and never 
make you feel like an idiot for asking questions.

So what's your problem?  It appears that Xaraya doesn't meet your coding 
standards.  Can you point us to a CMS that does?  What are the alternatives?

- Steve.

michael wrote:
> Hi,
> I have been using Xaraya for about a month now and I have a couple of 
> things to say regarding what I believe to be a very poor system.
> Firstly I would like to say that the templating system is quite good, 
> the syntax is very clean and very easy to remember, simple to learn, XML 
> compliant (although I have noticed domain specific logic contained in 
> templates).  However, the underlying core of the system is extremely 
> poorly developed.  I will start with the database.
> Tables and Field names prefixed with xar_ (or <whatever>_).  This is 
> unnecessary and adds verbosity to field names.  Also I noticed that 
> there is no common naming convention system i.e. id or primary key 
> fields are not always named the same nor is their suffix.  Given that 
> PHP is a dynamic language id would suffice and allow for code generation 
> etc.  When a system does not conform to conventions it ceases to be 
> predictable and thus it becomes harder to learn and more difficult to 
> generate classes / code for etc.  The database being the foundations of 
> any app this really says alot for the developers.
> There is a mix between OO and functional coding in the core which means 
> the system is not conforming to any strict paradigm and there is no 
> clear defined boundaries between where the objects in the system lie - 
> this is just sloppy and bad practice.  The coding is appaling, with 
> crappy comments that don't make any sense, huge unnecessary quantities 
> of conditional blocks - this is piss poor programming practice and often 
> very unnecessary.  example: modules/comments/xaruser/display.php - The 
> comments are scattered about not relevant.
> There are a number of cases where heavy functions are called in loops 
> when more efficient ways of doing things can be achieved with a little 
> time and thought.
> Xaraya is dog slow and doesn't scale - we have been throwing hardware at 
> it left right and center and it just doesn't take advantage of this, but 
> to be fair, nowhere on your site is it purported to be scalable.
> Finally the UI of the system is crap and makes little or no sense to 
> initial users (this goes against all fundamental UI engineering 
> practices) and offers large amounts of functionality by way of a steep 
> learning curve.
> Granted Xaraya is powerful and has some cool features but somebody needs 
> to sort out the QCP or interest in the system will die.  BTW I know of 
> no large reputable brands using the system or of any large companies 
> backing the project, this only validates my arguments further, and sadly 
> I can never, ever see this happening.
> Rgds,
> Michael