Geeklog Forums

Is it right to put such advertising in the featured news story? There is no right or wrong answer to this question. Geeklog lives or dies by its core devs so sure, why not? But this is also the world's window onto the GL community so not all interests can be bettered equally.

Funny thing is, I've been working on plugins that are similar in concept to your nexForm and nexFlow plugins.

I think this line says it all. As much as I love Geeklog, it doesn't act at all like an open source software (not that it has to, of course). There's no democracy and voting like in Wikipedia. Nobody knows who's in charge except Dirk and Blaine. It's virtually impossible for anyone other than them to inject new features.

Even the symbolic front page link to the bug tracker is gone.

Then, the Geeklog philosophy went on without a change to its plugins' authors, except there it's even one man in full charge (well, have you ever seen a female Geeklog developer?). So we have very few plugins and Blaine's ones usually cost money.

Again, I stress I have no right to demand anything, but I would have liked a communitee that makes decisions together, in true open source form. So yes, you're right. The entire system lies in the hands of perhaps two people and now one of them is seem to have gone 100% commercial.

To be honest, I don't even know know how big the community is if no one bothers replying to your topic.

Personnally I see this differently (mind you it may be the pints of vodka i am consuming tonight) but everyone has to make a living and I have no problem with the way geeklog is run, nor have i had a problem paying for stuff, over the 4-5 years i have used geeklog i have invested a good $1500 - $2000 between plugins and contributions to support individuals without any complaint.

If Blaine wants to produce professional plugins for sale it is his business and I am in no position to judge, there are many others that have done it too. If JM wants to charge for any off his plugins I would also be willing to pay for them should I need them and that goes for anyone on here.

I posted a feeler a number of weeks ago about a user blogs bounty ( a feature which has been requested numerous times to date) and blaine and JM were the only ones to show any interest.

Blaine, Dirk, Tony and all the other core team are under no obligation to continue with geeklog yet they do, committing their own time, money and energy into something they believe in, for which I am thankful.

As for the bug report system it has been stated in the developer mailing list this is being converted to mantis.

---

Dazzy

If you see the lack of responses on the forum the last months, I'm afraid Geeklog is slowly running towards a dead end, it simply can't compete with Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal etc.

Let's hope that the nice new themes some people introduced and ported recently will attract some new members who can give their 2c to the community.

Geeklog urgently needs a decent classifieds plugin, better spam protection, really good SEO, Digg-like rating options, fancy comment forms, banner/adsense manager, subcategories, tags, installer (is coming) and a new unique and astonishing CSS-based theme to become a CMS that can compete with the rest.

---

Dutch Geeklog sites about camping/hiking:
www.kampeerzaken.nl | www.campersite.nl | www.caravans.nl | www.caravans.net

There's probably a lot happening "behind the scenes" that people are not aware of when they don't read geeklog-devel. Add our slow release cycles and I can understand that it sometimes may appear as if the project is "dead". It isn't.

That's also one of the reasons for my Summer of Code Roundup post. I guess I should have mentioned that the 3 students who successfully completed their 1.x projects have indicated that they will be sticking around. In other words, we just got 3 new core developers.



Like what? This is something I care very much about, so please let us know what you think is missing from / wrong with the current one (preferrably in a new discussion thread).

bye, Dirk

Spam is actually something I think Geeklog has no problems with - ever since Mark's Captcha plugin.

Except one problem. However, it can be easily solved by finally making my patch official: A public dummy site mail and a protected real site mail

While Geeklog does need a few things, IMO some of the items you listed don't need to be there:

SPAM - With Marks Captcha plugin my site spam problem went down by 99%. I don't feel spam is a real issue at the moment (of course others may be having problems).
tags - While not known to most yet (since it is not released yet) jmucchiello has a tags plugin almost finished.
Digg-like rating options - The rating plugin does offer this
SEO - I'm just curious by what you mean really good?
adsense manager - What features are you looking for here? Just stick your adsense code in a block or template file. You could even use the autotag plugin if you want.


And regarding the Nextide Featured Story, my first gut reaction was that geeklog had sold out. After thinking it over, I'm ok with it. Blaine puts a lot of hard work into geeklog plus this does product does relate. When a company uses Geeklog or offers products and services related to Geeklog, it helps expand Geeklogs influence and shows it is a reliable cms solution. It probably would be a good thing if there was some pages on geeklog.net listing all of the commercial plugins and developers and either how to contact them or where to find their site to get more information about the product.

---

One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

Like Akismet, which is available for more blogsystems, not only to Wordpress. Captcha works fine of course, but lots of people are annoyed by it.

---

Dutch Geeklog sites about camping/hiking:
www.kampeerzaken.nl | www.campersite.nl | www.caravans.nl | www.caravans.net

Geeklog doesn't allow to put a story in more than one topic, tags will allow you to, and they could be used bij other plugins (image galleries etc) sitewide as well.

Only the rating part, not the "social" part.

- Better pagetitles, and the ability to edit them.
- Metadescription ditto
- Tags (internal links with the right anchor text, just the way Google likes it)
- SEO friendly URL's and navigation sitewide: www.site.com/topic/subtopic/story-id
- Google sitemap
- I can think of many more. Have a look at Wordpress and Drupal!


I know, and tried many blending options with good results (CTR>7%) but:
- Ads placed in the middle of a story convert better
- You're allowed only 3 Adsense ads per page
- So it's damn tricky just putting some ads in certain stories, since that could result in more than 3 ads on a page if you happen to see a few stories at a time on one page.
So a banner/adsense manager with some random functions sitewide would allow you to put some well converting ads on your site without annoying visitors or Google with too many ads.


Well, how do you think visitors, who do not know anything about GL and the efforts of Blaine and Dirk, would think of that story? I think they'll click the "back" button, since they're looking for an open source CMS.

---

Dutch Geeklog sites about camping/hiking:
www.kampeerzaken.nl | www.campersite.nl | www.caravans.nl | www.caravans.net

Good point here. There has been some disscusion on the mailing lists of late regarding this issue. New themes are being considered. There was also talk of better organization of the site and to make Geeklogs home page more friendly towards normal visitors looking for a CMS and not so developer oriented.

---

One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

And that's why I'm working on a plugin that allows tagging.... I suppose now I need to get it out the door.
Write it if you want it. Or bounty it. At a minimum, ask for it. Your post is the first I've seen looking for a full adsense plugin. Most folks just ask "how do I put adsense on my page". This is the first time I've heard "I need to put no more that 3 on a page and I want them inside of stories."

And as the writer of the autotags plugin.... Add a tag to the middle of your stories like [adsense:topic]. Create the phpautotags_adsense function. Inside it, declare a static var and increment it each time you put up an ad. After three ads, return '' from the autotag. Not that hard really.
Getting back on topic, this I can agree with. As I said: I'm not against the advertising on geeklog.net. I just don't think it should be featured.

First, there are many significant contributors to the Geeklog project and some of these comments are not warranted. A lot of work has been done in the past few months by the core developers (Oliver and Michael and our Summer Students) on GL 1.5. Thats not to mention the work Tony and his students have done on GL 2. Also let's not forget the great work that Mark and Eric have shown in the past few months and the launch of the gllabs.org site is a great new resource for the GL community. The core team is certainly more the Dirk and I,but I will be the first to say this community project would not be half as good without Dirk leading it.

We certainly need to be challenged and need new ideas raised but it should be in context and comments in this thread seem to be all over the place.


A very high percentage of of the visitors to this site are the GL community and many of these members use GL inside their businesses where they have needs for features and services that we announced with nexPro. This is important news to them as there is nothing like this available today, not even with other PHP frameworks.

Is this story advertising - maybe but it's mostly news and I've not just arrived on the scene, so this is not a un-solicited flying banner ad for a new toaster or faster better widget. Not only have I been contributing under my name for the past years, so has Nextide. In addition to many bug fixes and new features like the whole autotag API capability and MSSQL support we contributed.

I encourage you to look at the nexpro feature set, demo videos and our Wiki which we are continuing to be updated. It really shows what the GL application framework can do. For example, we have a client that is using the workflow engine and dynamic online forms for critical business processes. After 2 years, they have over 2000 forms and generated about 20,000 workflow tasks. This helps illustrate what a great framework and project geeklog is and I hope others in the community see this as more then advertising but significant news. NexPro is built on native GL and all of our plugins and features extend the native capabilities so it's certainly not a fork and we have no intentions of doing so.

These are excitting times for the GL community with new themes and plugins. Let's not be taking a negaitve view and bringing some of us down after so much hard work. I think we should be celebrating and far more up-beat. Anyone reading this thread up to now would surely have left the site and it would not have been because of the featured story.

---

Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com

Blaine, the point you are missing is that some people come to Geeklog for it's Geek appeal. And Geeks like Open Source. OS projects are not just code, but also community. It can be very frustrating that Geeklog is not run like other Open Source projects. Where's the roadmap? Where's the sense of openness? I've been making noise here for over two years and still feel like an outsider. OS projects usually have a sense of community. Geeklog is more cathedral than bazaar. Any suggestions or patches that never seem to go anywhere add to the sense that Geeklog is not a community OS project but a platform to further the core developers' commercial interests.

Now, of course, I'm sure there are lots of other OS projects run the same way. There's nothing wrong with the way Geeklog is run. But that doesn't mean we our reaction to seeing basically an ad on the geeklog.net homepage didn't strike a nerve. People post here about not liking the vibe of the featured story for a reason. Telling them they are wrong isn't the answer.

At no time has anyone said the core team should stop doing anything. The flaw here is visibility as I describe in the next section:

Of course because I can easily go read the release notes and see who contributed it. What? There are no release notes? Well, adding MSSQL was certainly on the roadmap as a planned feature, right? Has Geeklog 1.5 reached any of its milestones? If I wanted to do testing in CVS what should I concentrate on? I want to submit a patch for ADMIN_list who owns that feature? Forgive my sarcasm but the complete silence about future features and how the core team works or even what the core devs are working on can be deafening at times.

I disagree. Part of being an OS project is airing your dirty laundry. It happens. We post because we care. Better to have people who care then to have no people.

There is an Akismet module for Spam-X.

The problem with Akismet is that you need a wordpress.com account to be able to use it. So obviously we can't ship it with Geeklog because that would mean that we would have to ask our users to sign up with the "competition" before they can use the spam filter.

That's why we're using SLV which does pretty much the same thing but without the need to sign up for anything.

bye, Dirk

Okay, now you're being silly. There's a very detailed changelog right there in your public_html/docs directory. And it's linked from the top of changes.html

To quote:
Not to mention Randy's article about it.

As I already admitted above, we may have a visibility problem here - if you don't read the geeklog-devel mailing list, you won't know about some things that are going on. But you are on that mailing list, so I have to wonder about some of your comments here ...

bye, Dirk

OK, but that's also in the spirit of open source, right? Share services, knowledge, etc etc. Since yesterday it's even possible to integrate Wordpress into Drupal and Drupal into Wordpress, so what is "competition" in the world of open source?

---

Dutch Geeklog sites about camping/hiking:
www.kampeerzaken.nl | www.campersite.nl | www.caravans.nl | www.caravans.net

http://us1.samba.org/samba/
http://joomla.org/
http://gimp.org/ (Although, that is one ugly homepage)

How long did it take you to find the release notes or changelog at those web addresses? Where are these files for geeklog? Is there a feature list on the homepage? You pointed out changes.html, if I'm new to GL do I use the documentation link or the Wiki Docs link to stumble over it?

Yeah, I'm on the devel list. What are you working on for 1.5, Dirk? At the moment you are integrating your GSOC's student's web services code into 1.5 but what have you done since 12/31/2006 (release of 1.4.1)? I have no idea. How about Blaine? No idea. I suppose I could go read the CVS mailing list to find out. Severe changes were made to the ADMIN_list API a couple months ago. For what reason? I don't know. Is it for some other project I'm not aware of? I don't know but it does break any plugins using the old interface so there must be some important reason he did it.

I've asked all these questions on the mailing list and the response I got was the same one I got here. Many times I seen the response to the effect that roadmaps and such would be nice but there's no time for them. Here's an excerpt from a post by Oliver to me:
This is me asking specifically what is everybody working on. I got no response. Later in the thread I suggested that you just make small wiki page with a list of devs and a list of projects. The devs just fill it in when they have a few moments. Still I haven't any answers as to what is being done in 1.5. So, no, Dirk, being on the development list does not clue you in much more than not being on the list. The CVS list is the only place to find out what is in 1.5 but it isn't exactly the friendliest user interface.

I don't want to be so down about this. But it's not like this is the first time I've asked what's going on? Although this again astray for the topic at hand.

Well, you could consult the changelog - we've made it a habit to name-tag our contributions for the last couple of releases now.

Come on, Joe. What is all this really about?

bye, Dirk

What's this about? It's about people not wanting to see what looks like advertising in the featured story on the geeklog homepage. Everything else is just the floodgate of other things that have been bothering folks for a while now. I didn't know where the changlog (called history) file was until this thread. And it is a mix of projects and bug fixes with no structure. Better than nothing, sure. But not very satisfying.

And finally, this is why I've ratcheted it up a few notches. At the risk of seeming childish, I give you this:

Do they have checkin rights to the entire Geeklog CVS tree? If not, they aren't really core devs.

If they do, then it's nice to know now that someone wanting to become a dev just needs to sign up for the summer of code. Posting on the community website daily and submitting patches doesn't get you an invite. Nor does reading the cvs mailing list and submitting code reviews from the checkins.

I've never asked to be a dev. And I doubt the GSOC kids did either. Open source is all about recognition. Feeling like an outsider is not being recognized.

A link to it is one of the things that show up when you install GL. I have seen it so many times I am almost annoyed by it.




No. These kids did a little more. They finished their jobs well and displayed an interest.




I don't even know many of the names of the GL core team. I think you'd have to do a search somewhere in gl.net to maybe find a story where they are listed. Some members, like mevans - and perhaps you -, seem to be very well recognized without appearing to be in the core team. It isn't an honorary position.



Seems like this might actually be your problem. It is an easy one to fix.