Academic Lozbo

I’ve had a project in my mind for some time, I’ve been gathering information, making research and testing out things. This is a community based project, and I’m trying out Open Source CMS to find out which one suits better my needs.

Prelude

Truth is, looking for a social or community CMS is not an easy task, there seemed to be a lot less Community driven CMS than I expected, and they were really hard to find. I had almost given up to my only choice (Joomla! 1.5 + Community Builder Plugin) when, almost out of luck, I found Dolphin.

And to my amusement, today, one of the other platforms I was trying (Elgg) jumped out of the beta and released their 1.0 stable version. It’s really great to find more and more options.

I do have more options I haven’t tried (only read the specs in their respective about or info pages and/or tried their demo sites), but I will narrate in this article those I’ve tried, and my experience with each one: Joomla!, Dolphin, and Elgg.

Joomla!

I’ll begin from the beginning (duh!). I started digging around for plugins of my CMS of choice: WordPress and Joomla!. I’ve tried more, but not as much as WP, or even Joom, as I like to call it. Actually I just made that one out, never really called it like that before.

Anyhow, I didn’t find anything suitable in WordPress, and proceeded to Joomla!. There I found the aforementioned (and afore-linked) Community Builder plugin for Joomla, but to my sad notice, it’s only working for Joomla! 1.0.x versions, not fully supported in the latest 1.5.x series. There seems to be a private Release Candidate around though, but it’s, er, you know… private. Or, of course, you can pay to get it become a CB documentation subscriber and download it freely.

But this is not the concept I have as how Open Source works. I understand the developers, they want to see their efforts rewarded, they put a lot of effort into it, I know this it but, I’m just saying: if you go Open Source, then go all the way. Have you noticed that Joomla! doesn’t offer RC of their software as a thank you for paid subscribers? Are there even Joomla! paid subscribers at all? That’s my point. But I still appreciate the effort and I do congratulate the team behind it, this was just something I wanted to vent out of my head.

Anyway: I didn’t want to prevent that from testing and I paid installed Joomla! 1.0.15, to try the current available Community Builder plugin. Everything went on well, no problems, until I installed the advanced search module needed for my project. The most important feature of my community site is the ability to perform advanced user searches, and of course, the ability to fully customize user profiles, being this later feature already available within the Community Builder plugin, but not the search.

I read that on the upcoming Community Builder version this feature has been addressed, but I will hold my victory singing and crazy free beer party celebration until it’s released to the people.

But as I said, the search was not working properly, there were database errors of some kind. Didn’t work.

Another downside of this combo, is that besides Joomla!, I needed the Community Builder package, which is not just uploading one file: you need I don’t remember how many different modules and components (no more than 3 or 4), not hard at all, but still it’s not as easy as, for example, installing a plugin in a self hosted WordPress. I know this has to do with Joomla!, the way it’s coded, and the way Community Builder is implemented and how it works, and etc, I know this, I’m just sharing out my experience from a best CMS point of view, which of course includes how easy it is to install.

So all in all, it does not work as expected, I needed too many things (not working out of the box), and the latest versions needed are not yet available (and I’m not planning to use obsolete software). I can only hope that the newer version works fine with Joomla!’s latest version and has the functionality I need. But until then…

Dolphin

I don’t really remember how I got to their homepage, it was almost a coincidence, the story is not important but the fact is that I almost overlooked it. But I did not and I was happy to found it. In the beginning of course…

Dolphin seemed to do the stuff I needed for my community, out of the box! Basically: integrated profile search and integrated customization of fields (adding/removing/tweaking).

So I installed, made some tests, and tweaked it a bit. First impressions:

• Installation not for newbies, it requires a lot more knowledge than installing WordPress, for example (in my case, my only problem was setting up cron jobs, I’ve heard of them before, but never worked with or set one up, and for this I asked to my hosting provider support geeks)
• The (X)HTML output is not valid (not a must in this project but I’m still obsessed with it so I’ll probably try to correct if it doesn’t require to tweak core files, or at least not too much anyway)
• Big ad links to the respective software makers in the free version (not too much of a big deal for me in this project, really, if the community starts working, I would consider paying)
• Poorly documented, limited info only available in some forums (this really makes me angry, well not really, more like sad-ish)

After a lot of reading and more tweaking, I found that basic tasks as editing the header or the footer, creating/managing content and profile fields, or tweaking the CSS styles are not that hard, but the documentation is very poorly implemented. The wiki has almost no info. The files in a template have names like “page_1.html” and “page_4.html” (what happened to page_2 and 3, I do not know). The visual aids in the admin section is not always so helpful, some names of variables and stuff are not really descriptive, etc.

I have an overall feeling of being a little bit betrayed, tricked. Feels to me like they do this on purpose, so that you are forced to ask for professional support or even for someone to install and/or configure this software for you. I might be stating things paranoid-ly, maybe, but I do hear voices in my head!

Anyway, as I said before: if you go Open Source, then adopt an Open Source mood. Else don’t claim you are open source only to trick (or give little choice) to your users into buying support. With Dolphin, I don’t get the Open Source Mojo I get from projects like Joomla! or WordPress.

My suggestion to Boonex developers:

• use good descriptive file naming conventions;
• release all your documentation online (the more extensive the better);
• provide enhanced help tool tip aids in the administration panel;
• give me all your money;
• adopt a more overall open source community philosophy!

It feels weird that, being developers of a community CMS and all that, their own community sucks is not as good as I would expect. I posted a couple of comments in Dolphin forum threads, and posted one new thread of my own, asking for stuff, and I haven’t got an answer yet, this was two days ago. I know this is not a lot, but I have the feeling this will remain like that for a long time, and I think it’s strange for an Open Source community with more than 26,000 users.

Well I’m just giving out my opinion, this is not enough to judge a community and everything, please take into account this is just my particular experience I’m sharing.

Then I haven’t really tweaked Dolphin exhaustively, but I’m running out of ideas and I don’t have answers or documentation. I am not letting that stop me, but it’s not that easy.

Another thing to note is that they seem to put out new versions at a somewhat fast rate, for some this is good but for me not so much, I like my software working stable for as much as it can hold, I like bothering in installing new versions only when needed, for security fixes or great new features. I always upgrade my WordPress projects as fast as I can, sometimes even a few minutes after a new version is released, and (with WordPress and SVN) is really easy (though but not so much in other projects), and as I say, I don’t like to worry about updating stuff, but in the content and/or the users, so I prefer not having a lot of new and shiny stuff (which are not core features) right away, so unless there’s no security or bug fix, I rather wait.

My conclusion: Dolphin works great out of the box, it’s easy to customize the basic options but only if you look into the right forums and/or tutorials, and if you want to do something a bit more complex, information, if exists, it’s really hard to find. But it has been the best option so far, so unless the new Community Builder is all that I expect, or some plugins are developed (I will talk about it right away) for Elgg, I will stick with Dolphin.

Elgg

I was planning to write this review after I made more tests and tweaking both Dolphin and the new Community Builder, but I would have had to wait I don’t know how much longer, and then I got the notification that Elgg 1.0 was out. So I immediately proceeded to read more about it.

I already have had tried a previous (so called classic) version of Elgg, but couldn’t easily and fast work out what I wanted (advanced and search-able user profile) so I quickly dropped it, as I knew that a new version was on the works.

So I took a look, read stuff, left some comments in an Elgg’s release post, and unsuccessfully tried to contact the developers through an inexistent Elgg contact page, but achieved it anyway through the CurveRider contact page (they are the developers of Elgg).

As I installed and tried out Elgg (with a few minor problems, not totally my fault but Elgg’s, though nothing serious), I noticed that there was a profile plugin, which, in the source code has a comment that hints a future version that will enable users to customize the fields on the profile, but it’s not currently available. So what I contacted Elggs developer about was to address this, to show my interest in this plugin and that it should also make this fields search-able in the front end.

Another thing to note here: everything in Elgg is considered a plugin, so there are two flavors of Elgg, a core and a full featured package. The full featured includes some plugins bound by default, but these can rather be considered more like core stuff anyway.

So, in the end: Elgg has invalid markup but a nice look, and is really simple and easy to toy around with as an admin, though as this is a brand new, still hot 1.0 release, there are virtually no plugins. Haven’t tried out tweaking templates yet, need the functionality first.

Overall conclussion

As I said, right now I stay with Dolphin, it is already doing a lot of stuff I need, but I get this mala vibra feeling around it.

I look forward to the Community Builder’s new release, and for Elgg’s development of my so desired plugin.

I also have a few other CMS wrote down in a queue list, but I shall talk more about them when their time comes, they are not as promising as the dissected above.