[theforum] A sound of silence

[Martin Burns]

On 20 Nov 2008, at 18:07, Matt Warden wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 12:50 PM,  <ekm at seastorm.com> wrote:
>> Like Matt, would like to hear (again, maybe *from* Matt) ideas about
>> energizing evolt.
>
> Ditch drupal and write a custom CMS using ruby on rails

To put the first few counter arguments that come to mind, for balance  
sake, in no particular order:

1) Code-fests were only ever a small group of people that met a small  
number of times. Both dwindled to effectively zero a long time before  
we moved to Drupal (and the dwindling was a contributory factor). As a  
community builder, it's streets behind even the beervolts we had in  
London.

2) weo is a means, not an end

3) Custom Build is playing developer-decades' worth of catchup

4) NIH (Not Invented Here) is generally an exercise in vanity

5) evolt has always used other people's software; if Custom-Build is  
important, why start/stop at weo? Why not do list management, web  
framework, operating system (etc)

6) Using weo to experiment on is hugely risky; better to start on  
(say) leo front end

7) Even given a surge of enthusiasm, building what we'd now understand  
as a competent CMS from scratch in any timeframe measurable in weeks  
or months is wildly optimistic

8) By definition, CMS core development could only involve a subset of  
skills that the evolt community has (and point 1 bears this out), so  
automatically excludes a lot of people who simply cannot be part of  
the 'inner circle'. Building templates (even with PHP) doesn't take a  
lot of learning.

I'll leave others to discuss the value/otherwise of RoR-specifics.

tbh, if coding stuff is valuable in its own right, we'd be better off  
custom-coding Drupal modules. Within the community, we probably (it  
feels to me anyway) have more PHP people than anything else.

Cheers
Martin

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