[theforum] Can't get on steering, finance or sysadmin

[Martin Paul Burns]

Joel wrote on 21/05/2004 20:36:25:

> And I'd love to see us find a way to migrate to open source. I assume we
> built with CF etc. because that was the toolset/skillset when DJC et al
> fired this thing up.

To give a bit of history:
When we started weo, there were no generally available packaged CMSs
(unless you wanted to spend an arm and a leg at the Broadvision store). So
we adapted a basic site management tool that one of the admins (Walker for
those playing at home) had built with Access and CF - a self-build job.

This was very much added to over the years, coding from raw CF and SQL, and
also migrated backends a couple of times from Access/WinNT to Oracle/Linux
to SQLServer/Win2k.

Howevever, that was 199*cough*, and this is 2004. If you were wanting to
set up a site now, you'd be *mad* (or wanting to learn how it's done, or
vain, or looking for more fees than strictly necessary) to self-code a CMS
from nothing when there are so many free (in one or both senses) CMSs
available for the taking. Many of these have done all the *really* hard,
yet mundane, stuff of version control, ACLs and so on, and made them
available as super-nice APIs that you can customise on top of.

> But we're not married to it, are we?

No not at all. The main reason for sticking with what we have is that it's
what we have, and it does the job it does without too much extra effort.

> I understand
> the hugeness of converting the existing CMS backend to something else,

Less huge than coding a replacement CMS from scratch.

> but I hope we're smrt enough to be able to do that.

You'd think, eh?

Cheers
Martin