Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Some Feedback From an OpenACS Newbie

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Posted by Andrew S on
Hi Caroline.

If you have case studies from reputable places like NASA about why they're using OpenACS and how it's working out for them, that would make OpenACS more desirable in my eyes, sure.  The links to .LRN also do that.

A related thing: I have the impression from reading a thread somewhere else in these forums (I think that is where I read that) that the installation of OpenACS takes about a day.  Is that right?  I really don't know how long it takes to do an install -- that would be valuable information to know, and putting it right at the top of the installation instructions would be helpful.

Also, if it really does take a day, maybe the installation instructions could explain why that is and why the installation can't be made to take, say, 15 minutes.  Better still would be to make it actually take 15 minutes.  I think the ideal situation would be for OpenACS to let you do really simple web sites like "hello world" in 15-60 minutes, and take more time to do more complicated things.  If it really takes a day to install, then people like myself are going to perceive that as a big investment of time just to try something out.  More than that and I am going to be very reluctant to try it out.  I don't know if I am representative, but I hate screwing around installing stuff, so that plays a part too -- the longer it takes the more I hate it and the more likely I am to give up.

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Posted by C. R. Oldham on
Well, I can do an OpenACS install in about 5 minutes now, from checkout from CVS to running server.  But I have all the components installed (AOLserver, Postgres on some boxes, Oracle on others, all the required libraries, etc).

So I'm not sure where you might have got the 1 day figure, but I suppose if you had to compile everything from scratch, find all the necessary libraries, etc it could take you a day.  Or if you had to install Oracle, it definitely could take you more than one day, especially if you need to apply patchsets and so forth.

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Posted by bill kellerman on
download, compilation, installation, and configuration took about a half day for me to have one instance of openacs running separate, customized websites handling multiple domains with user registration and management, news, forums, and file management...  even a cheap chat module i wrote in about 15 minutes afterwards.

if you haven't by now, i'd advise actually trying to download and install on a test server.  you'd be surprised how much functionality exists by default, much more than most web application packages i've seen and obviously more than hello world.

in the time it took you to write that question, you probably could have been well on your way to installing your own test site.