This thread was creating in response to a discussion Haitham and I had about the merits of Xaraya v. TypePad and WordPress. As there is no way at the moment within Xaraya to move comments to other topics, I’ll just enter links to the original comments and hope that you will continue to discuss them in this thread, to keep things dandy!
Comments
CMSs and other techie issues
I didn’t know that you are evolved in the Xaraya development. I would love to be a beta tester if any is required.
OTOH, until Xaraya implements some anti-spam tool, I guess I will not use it as a full time blogging/cms software. Registration limits the interaction and adds some admin involvement which I think is a waste of time, specially when we are talking about a non-profit website.
Talking about flexibility, I just noticed few things:
1. Xaraya lacks the “Search Engine Friendly Links”. I wonder if this is on To-do list of the developers or it’s available and you are not using it?
2. This post does not have a link from the main page. I wonder how can I follow it in the future without going to the original post?
3. This post and other related post (such as the Arabic translation post) does not have any date!
Well, I like the layout of your website, I wonder if what I mentioned are just the way you set it up, or they need development.
BTW, http://ar.xaraya.com/ ? Is it suppose to be the Arabic version?
I saw there a note saying that Xaraya need to increase the number of members of Web Team to fill a number of positions. If you are the right person to contact, then I would love to. Also to try and help in the Arabic translation. Please feel free to contact me offline if u like for more discussion.
Re: CMSs and other techie issues
[quote]1. Xaraya lacks the “Search Engine Friendly Links”. I wonder if this is on To-do list of the developers or it’s available and you are not using it? [/quote]
Um, no, Xaraya has SE URLs. They can be further enhanced by use of mod rewrite, but out of the box, Xaraya supports short URL’s where indexing matters. Furthermore, google indexes three arguments deep now, so the URLs are more a cosmetic issue than a SE one.
[quote]2. This post does not have a link from the main page. I wonder how can I follow it in the future without going to the original post? [/quote]
Which has nothing to do with Xaraya. That is up to the design of the site.
[quote]3. This post and other related post (such as the Arabic translation post) does not have any date! [/quote]
There are other tools than just keywords for sorting, and giving a date for a related entry. It’s not Xaraya that limits this, but rather the make up of the site.
As far as your other comments, Xaraya does not need registration for comments, Mahmood just has it set up as so. The registration / roles / privileges are as strict or as loose as the site admin wants. Really has nothing to do with Xaraya.
And as soon as there is a standard anti-spam tool, we’ll implement it. I am not going to chase six apart’s spec in the meantime. Once the trackback spec calmed down, I implemented it. Once their blacklist spec is open, I’ll implement it. I see no reason to go and create another spam bot for the sake of creating one though, when blogging tools are working on a common spec.
If you think of any other things you want seen, feel free to post them at http://bugs.xaraya.com . We’ll look at them. I blog with Xaraya, so I normally watch them closely.
CMSs and other techie issues
[quote]Which has nothing to do with Xaraya. That is up to the design of the site. [/quote]
[quote]There are other tools than just keywords for sorting, and giving a date for a related entry. It’s not Xaraya that limits this, but rather the make up of the site. [/quote]
That’s what I thought…
[quote]As far as your other comments, Xaraya does not need registration for comments, Mahmood just has it set up as so.[/quote]
For a good reason. To fight spam! Had he had a tool, he would not make it so difficult to comment!
[quote]And as soon as there is a standard anti-spam tool, we’ll implement it.[/quote]
Well, I’m not a pro in this stuff, but I thought that there is nothing called ‘standard’ in an Open Source world.
[quote]I am not going to chase six apart’s spec in the meantime. Once the trackback spec calmed down, I implemented it. Once their blacklist spec is open, I’ll implement it. I see no reason to go and create another spam bot for the sake of creating one though, when blogging tools are working on a common spec. [/quote]
It is Xaraya users who have to suffer then. The anti-spam tool that six apart is adopting is not their’s. Blacklist is a plugin developed by independent developer. It just happen that six apart likes it, and so does the users of MT, and it works great.
OTOH, I guess that MT-Blacklist is open source. Plus MT-blacklist is not an IP address blacklist like that which Movable Type provides.
Anyway, WP users realized that they need similar tool and now there are many. The best I’ve come across so far was the Kitten’s Spaminator.
Re: CMSs and other techie issues
[quote]Well, I’m not a pro in this stuff, but I thought that there is nothing called ‘standard’ in an Open Source world. [/quote]
That’s a very silly comment. How do you think you get an RSS feed to multiple clients? How can Xaraya ping weblogs.com? How can Xaraya send a trackback to a MT site? Why is this site running on Apache? It’s common specs. If someone comes out with a common spec on blacklisting comments, I’ll implement it, but what I don’t anticipate doing is creating multiple blacklists across the net because I have better things to work on.
Secondly, the plugin that you are talking about is not compatible with the GPL and is not Open Source:
[quote]Copyright 2003 Jay Allen
# This code cannot be redistributed without
# permission from the author.[/quote]
So I can’t even think about making compatible changes until there is a clearing house for blacklist.
Movable Type is a good tool, use it if you like. No sweat off my ass, and no money out of my pocket. It really makes no difference to me. In the meantime, if there is a feature that you want to see in Xaraya, by all means log it in our bug tracker:
http://bugs.xaraya.com
It’s the least you can do, after throwing up so many fallicies and innacuracies about Xaraya compared to MT.
Re(1): CMSs and other techie issues
I just fixed all templates for the various article types to be uniform, as far as the article’s poster, date, time and number it has been read. That didn’t take that long to do, basically just amended a few div tags (I thought I might as well fix their display properties as well as I have been putting that off for a while now) and adding a “#date#” tag to display the date in the appropriate location.
You need to come over here so I can show you how easy it is to do stuff within Xaraya. It would be even better if you downloaded the latest release and installed it on one of your computers to play around with it, and I’ll give you a guided tour. I am sure you will be impressed. Guaranteed! 🙂
Re: CMSs and other techie issues
Thanks John for taking care of this.
Haitham, as John says, the points you raised are all related to how I designed the templates of the site. The date/time thing can be added with a phrase or two in the template, so thanks for pushing, me in that direction, I need to normalise the various templates I am using for each section.
For your information, John is the gentleman who started PostNuke and then Xaraya. He is obviously key to both development efforts.
As to ar.xaraya.com, that’s my fault, I offered to Arabise it as I have done for PHP-Nuke, then PostNuke after that, but I just got too busy for Xaraya. Thank you for your offer of helping me translate it though and I hearby accept your offer with thanks! I’ll set up another domain so that we both can translate as we go, then submit the final resulting files to Xaraya to include in distributions or make available for download.
Once that is done, or as we are doing that, we can start translating articles on Xaraya main and posting those topics to ar.xaraya if an when needed.
Re: CMSs and other techie issues
Not at all Haitham, no one forced the thousands of people using it for live production sites, although it is still officially beta. But they do, and that is a testament to Xaraya’s stability and breadth. You have no idea how far we have come.
So have patience my friend. The thrust of the effort now in this late beta stage is performance, performance and stability. Once 1.0 comes out, you will probably see that hundreds of people will start churning out modules left right and centre. Especially if you take into consideration Xaraya’s published and solid API.
CMSs and other techie issues
Cox, all what I can say is that I really hope that your are not in the marketing team of this CMS.
As a matter of respect to Mahmood and my friends around this Blog, I will not reply to your sweet comments, and now I care shit about being involved in this “One Of a Kind and the Greatest Ever Created CMS Tool,” in the human history!
Mahmood, thanks for the invitation to try the tool, but if this “Cox” is the kind of people behind it, I doubt I will ever think off it.
Re: CMSs and other techie issues
I see, so let me get this straight. You spread fallicies about something that you have not tried, nor know very little about, not to mention your ignorance of Open Source licensing and tools in general, and this is then my fault, and deserves a flame from you towards me.
Anywho, thanks for your comments and ideas, and I certainly wish you nothing but the best of luck in your future.
CMSs and other techie issues
Hey, do you call the lack of anti-spam tool a “fallacies” comment? This is what it’s all about and how it started! Plus this is between me and Mahmood, the owner of this site and we are talking about the best utilization of his chosen CMS tool to fit the needs of the visitors of this blog. Kind of friend to friend talk. That’s why he created this post to continue the discussion here. So if I intended to argue with developers of this tool, then I would have done that at the bugs forum. OTOH, I didn’t claim to be a wizard if you read my comments well, but then I know my stuff well enough.
Anyway, save your emotional comments to your tool users and best of luck!
Best of luck, Mahmood!
Re: CMSs and other techie issues
Why does everybody has a short temper today? Even I suffered from it a bit! Must be end of Ramadhan blues or something.
Ok, I think both of you guys started on the wrong foot, and interpreted each others’ comments as attacks. Maybe they should have been read in a rosier light etc etc.
if possible, let’s start this discussion again if you wish, but let’s just concentrate on technicalities in order to reach a concensus of where and what needs to be done.
As for me however, I am comfortable with Xaraya and will stick to it. I believe in its future and know that it is far superior to just about everything out there. It is expandable, extensible, secure and fun to work with. I have not seen anything approaching the same flexibility in others.
If I understand it correctly, from the very limited time I have had with both MT and WP, they are blogging tools and just that. Xaraya is not just blogging, it is an architecture which could be used for just about any web application you can think of. Just the Articles, Categories and Comments modules could be used in a number of ways which make a site a blog, ecommerce site, shopfront, informational, and whatever you may think of site. That’s why I like it.
I use Xaraya for my company at http://computerpoint.tv and this blog. I had http://bahraini.tv running on it as well as my clan site at http://alyousif.tv. Both bahraini and alyousif are off the air as I don’t have time to maintain them. I want to change computerpoint.tv a bit, but need time to sit and think of what I want to do out of it, maybe when John brings out the ecommerce module I can at last start to make money off of the internet, rather than the other way ’round!
Anyway, Haitham, as you are much more familiar with MT and WP, I would love to see you demonstrating them, I am more than willing to show you more in-depth features of Xaraya. As we both will not move off our chosen platform, it would be fun just comparing notes, who knows, we might learn from each other and exchange ideas.
Re(1): CMSs and other techie issues
Thank you Mahmood. But as I saw here, it’s probably not the best forum to demonstrate things. I’m afraid that developers will get upset and complain that no one is allowed to criticize (for good well) there cms, and maybe that should be done at Xaraya forums.
To be honest, I have no time or interest to do that, neither here nor there. I’m happy with what I have at the moment, in the future I might think of switching to Drupal or Mambo or even Zope. I have them all installed on my test machines, thought of giving Xaraya a shot, but after what I heard from Cox, I doubt I will, at least at the moment. Maybe when Xaray release 1.0, I might…
Thanks again!
Re: CMSs and other techie issues
No, I call the following fallacies:
The lack of standards in Open Source.
The lack of short urls in Xaraya.
The lack of the ability to post comments when logged in.
The lack of proper date format.
The strain on the users.
And so on…
What you misunderstood was the use of the word. Let me introduce you to it:
# A false notion.
# A statement or an argument based on a false or invalid inference.
# Incorrectness of reasoning or belief; erroneousness.
All of which describe your comments. If the word fallacy upsets you so much, which wasn’t the intent, then use the word mistake, as it means the same, except when you are trying to get your point of view across, which you were.
Why on earth that pissed you off, I have no idea, but then again I don’t really care at this point. I think that you need to do a little soul searching as to why a single word used in context would bring you to the point to attack another person via a silly blog entry. It leaves me with a very poor view of your character, and quite frankly not upset in the least that our paths won’t cross via Xaraya. I have little patience for rude people, which from every indication that I have seen by your recent comments, describes you quite nicely.
Now that isn’t a fallacy, but rather a perception of mine if you would like to get upset for a reason.
[Modified by: John Cox (niceguyeddie) on November 14, 2004 05:13 PM]
Re(2): CMSs and other techie issues
I invited you to criticize all you like on our bug tracker.
I don’t really care about critism of Xaraya, feel free to post whatever you want about it, but at least do the rest of the folks some good and post the ideas where they can do some good. Some folks like it, some folks don’t. I don’t lose sleep over either.
As far as the personal attacks towards me, keep it up, as that doesn’t bother me either. I have thick skin, which it seems you lack since you are upset about the correct usage of a single word. I can think of further words if you like as we continue the conversation.
Re(1): CMSs and other techie issues
I am not upset in the least, and I didn’t misinterpret the comments at all. I’m a bit surprised as to the direction that he took the conversation but oh well. Critical thinking is lost on some folks, as well as manners.
Re(1): CMSs and other techie issues
Thx Mahmood, Cox, for the great introduction!
This thread is becoming a waste of time. I’ll not follow up here any more.
All the best, Xaraya!