CMSMS 2.0 Project Shelved

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calguy1000
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CMSMS 2.0 Project Shelved

Post by calguy1000 »

Today we have an announcement about the future direction of CMS Made Simple. After extensive discussion amongst the development team regarding our roadmap, we’ve made a decision which we know is the best way to continue ongoing development of the software. This decision relates to the development and release of “CMSMS 2.0”.

The CMSMS 1.x series has been extremely popular. Through developing the core of this series we have come to appreciate a number of things that were not so apparent at the time of first conceptualizing “CMSMS 2.0”. The 1.X series has continued to get more users, features, capabilities and modules, including some of the ideas from the "2.0" branch (though implemented differently). All of this has resulted in the fact that the "2.0" branch as originally thought out has become outdated.

“CMSMS 2.0” was to be the next generation of content management systems for everybody going forward. It would include things like content versioning and workflow stuff for enterprises, multi-language capabilities, a hierarchical permissions manager, an extensive ORM (object relational mapping) tool for developers and much more.

We envisioned slowing the development on further CMSMS 1.x releases at around the 1.3 stage and focusing primarily on “CMSMS 2.0”.. At that time we knew we would be facing a complete rewrite and a daunting task with module compatibility. However we knew that we would be able to overcome these issues and given enough time we could solve these problems. Of course we knew that the 1.x series would have a long life even after "2.0" came out, but envisioned slowly fading out support for 1.x as modules caught up.

However at this time it has not worked out. The development of the 1.X series, where we’ve been able to provide solutions at a fairly fast rate has, by necessity, been more important. After all, that is the software that’s being used. Plus of course, as this is an open source and voluntary project, we have to share our time on it with paid work, families and life in general!

As a result the of the ongoing development of 1.X we have found time and time again that the starting efforts we had made on “CMSMS 2.0” required re-doing due to changes in the underlying framework, or to lessons we had learned in the 1.X stream. Eventually three or more years had gone by, slowly working on the foundations of “CMSMS 2.0” and steadily improving 1.x. Yet we were still facing a ‘complete rewrite’ for "2.0".
As mentioned at the start of this announcement the Dev team has discussed all of these issues extensively many times and again at our most recent Dev team meeting. We knew that the community could not be kept hanging indefinitely.

Thus we have come to the decision that our time and resources are best used by continuing to evolve the 1.X series. At this time we are officially shelving the “CMSMS 2.0” project as it was described.

The good news is that all of you that have invested thousands of person hours and thousands of dollars into developing websites for, modules for, and web applications in CMS Made Simple can rest easy that your investment is sound. We have not lost faith or momentum in the Content Management System that we all know and love. Instead of writing a whole new CMS we will evolve it over time to accommodate the features that we want and still maintain our original focus and goals.

The best ideas and lessons learned from the "2.0" experiment will be migrated into the 1.x series over time. We are evolving towards a more modular, better performing system allowing third party modules to tie further into the system, or even replace some of the functionality. Features like centralized module templates and better content flexibility will slowly move from the "2.0" experiment into reality in the 1.x series. We will continue to implement more ideas, optimizations and features that we find useful that we never thought of when "2.0" was born such as better support for mobile devices and admin side search. Our next release CMS 1.10 is a step towards implementing some of the changes planned for the "2.0" series.

We are sure you will understand the reasoning behind our decision. We hope you look forward to a ongoing investment in your favorite content management system, just as we look forward to continue to work with you.
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jmcgin51
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Re: CMSMS 2.0 Project Shelved

Post by jmcgin51 »

Thanks for the update, Calguy! 1.9.4.x has been lightning fast and very stable in my experience, so I have no complaints about continuing with the 1.x series.
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Solutic
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Re: CMSMS 2.0 Project Shelved

Post by Solutic »

Thanks for the update, as long as v 1.* works fine for me, i won't complain ;-)

It just would be nice if you could do something for a built-in multilanguage solution :-)
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protempore
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Re: CMSMS 2.0 Project Shelved

Post by protempore »

Hello,
is understandable fatigue of the development team to balance the demands of work and sustenance for their families to contribute to an open source project like CMSMS.

Just to give a concrete sign of this solidarity of the community of users of CMSMS because in addition to the proposed future direction that you do not also accompany a "CMSMS Professional" distributed with shareware?

Ultimately, it is fair that those with CMSMS is also contributing to the efforts of business and the work that others put at his disposal.

sorry my google-English
;)

I hope not to have unleashed a war of religion
;D
replytomk3

Re: CMSMS 2.0 Project Shelved

Post by replytomk3 »

Is multi-site / multi-domain capability on the new roadmap for the 1.x series anytime soon?
calguy1000
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Re: CMSMS 2.0 Project Shelved

Post by calguy1000 »

As I've posted in the past, The CMSMS Dev team has discussed the 'Multi-Site' issue, and have long decided that we will not be attacking this issue.

Similarly, 'Multi Lang' functionality will not be built into the core at any time in the near future.

What we will be doing on the other hand is progressively making the core both lighter weight, and more flexible (with more events, and API functions) to allow third party modules to attack these problems in better and more comprehensive ways.

CMSMS 1.10 is slated to have some 'refactoring' to the language capabilities to allow a more complete multi-lang addon module. (Mostly some new events).
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replytomk3

Re: CMSMS 2.0 Project Shelved

Post by replytomk3 »

Modules to attack multi-site and multi-language is OK. But I have found those two features to be more and more important as my websites have developed. I myself did not care about those two features just two years ago...

On the subject of being light, I beg for the page list to be rewritten to not load all pages into memory. I have one website with only 400 pages, but even that is unmanageable with CMSMS as one of the categories has 70+ pages, and memory on the hosting environment being limited to 36M, that category cannot be expanded. And I am running just a few additional modules.

If that issue is not critical, I don't know what should be.
calguy1000
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Re: CMSMS 2.0 Project Shelved

Post by calguy1000 »

On the subject of being light, I beg for the page list to be rewritten to not load all pages into memory. I have one website with only 400 pages, but even that is unmanageable with CMSMS as one of the categories has 70+ pages, and memory on the hosting environment being limited to 36M, that category cannot be expanded. And I am running just a few additional modules.
The listpages stuff has occupied alot of our time in many of the recent versions of CMSMS. We've invested around 40 or 50 combined man hours in looking at this in 1.10 alone. There have been additional hundreds of man hours gone in to optimizing the way the functionality works, while still making it flexible, and extend-able (at least that's the plan). Just in 1.10 we've diagnosed that the code that loads the content objects for 1.10 is fairly optimal... the problem is the size of the content objects. We have verified that the system is NOT loading all of the pages (unless you've clicked expand-all) and that the content pages are not being loaded multiple times, and that the memory usage is linear (large amounts of pages == large amounts of objects == large amount of memory required). And we have tried to verify that content objects are not being copied in memory un-necessarily. The core content objects are large enough. If you use use AdvancedContent or Cataloger the objects are orders of magnitude larger. just increasing the amount of memory, and time required...the flexibility we have comes at a cost.

We will be making efforts to make this more scalable, by reducing the size of the core content objects where reasonable. However the authors who have written modules that provide content types will be responsible for optimizing their code. There is nothing we can do about that.

Next you also need to remember... that CMSMS is not designed to manage large sites. The content system is designed for small to medium sized sites (dozens to a few hundred pages). For everything else a module that provides handling for a specialized data type should be used. We have no plans to go away from this. If CMSMS were designed for large sites the content management system (including the interface) and the menu system, and the routing, and content editing, etc. would have been designed far differently.

Next somebody will obviously ask couldn't you just rewrite it to use 'some other method'. And here's a preemptive answer to that: Yes we could. But once you consider some of the things that we would 'like' to do in listcontent, including some of the feature requests... it doesn't become very feasible. The next thing we could do is rewrite it to use mechanisms like filtering, and pagination like the modules do. We have argued about this in the past, and we all agree that it breaks the usability that people like so it's a catch-22 situation.

In conclusion... we're doing what we can. but there are alot of things to consider.
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replytomk3

Re: CMSMS 2.0 Project Shelved

Post by replytomk3 »

CMSMS is so elegant, I try to use it anywhere I can, be it multi-site, multi-language, or multi-thousand-pages installations. That is the core problem. :)
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