Forum OpenACS Q&A: Would OpenACS be a good choice for my web site?

Hi Kevin,

You dont need to drop your existing system in order to get fiew new features. OACS is a big system in my opinion to big for your requirements.
As you said what you realy need is to change "the Members and Class Schedules pages, into dynamic pages"
It is much easier to find some help and build new features to your existing site then to change the whole site all together. Good luck.

Jay

And, having said all that, yes, openacs is -big- with lots to learn and such. Overall, it's for big sites like amazon and like that. See: http://photo.net for a real example of the collaborative features of the original ACS (ArsDigita Community System).

I'd say work with it for awhile... see what you think, and see how easy it is to customize. Keep going thru the tutorial; I have an unobtrusive solution for the content repository thing, I'll look for it

(To Moderator: Hi... Could someone edit the above post to replace my email addr with my name? thanks :)

I put some diffs that might still work in 5.3.1 here:

https://openacs.org/storage/index?folder%5fid=585243

Enjoy

Forgive me if this gets mangled. I tried sending this reply via e-mail and it failed with a "no such user" error.

Michael,

On Sun, 10 Aug 2008, mailto:m.marti.menzel@eurotransmit.com wrote:

this is how I see it, being - like you - someone who has little experience
with programming.

I wouldn't exactly say I had little programming experience. All my
experience might be described as "amateur" experience, though. I started
programming in BASIC in junior high and high school(mid to late '80s).
Although I went on to college after high school I unfortunately I dropped
out towards the end of my second semester. But, while I was there I
learned Pascal on a VAX 11/750, and dBase on PCs(286 PCs at the time to be
exact). At home I did quite a bit of dBase and Clipper programming
through the years, and still do. I'm currently using clip, a open source
Clipper compatible compiler from www.itk.ru, on my FreeBSD box at home.
For the past decade or so I've been working as an IBM mainframe operator.
At work I've done a bit of COBOL, Eztrieve, and Gener/OL programming and
have picked up the basics of IBM mainframe assembler. And, as for web
environments I've tried PHP, Python, and Ruby.

Well, it has been really frustrating. OpenACS is hard to install, very
badly documented (the "up-to-date" documentation refers to a previous
version of OpenACS). Afer all the hassle you just see a very spartan
thing, where nothing seems to be there.

Installation can be a challenge. I've got it working on FreeBSD using the
OpenACS port from the FreeBSD ports collection, and I've also managed to
get it working installing everything from source on OpenSolaris.

After a couple of tries it's become obvious the OpenACS community doesn't
want newcommers. My post you replied to is about a year old which is back
when I first tried OpenACS. Back then I ran into problems just trying to
get through the developer's tutorial, which one would expect to be one of
the first things a new developer would try. One problem I was told was
due to a four to five year old bug that should have been fixed long ago.
Well, I'm back a year later and the tutorial hadn't changed, and the same
bugs are still present. I posted to the forum and received no replies.
Eventually I tried asking a few questions on the IRC channel and finally
got through the tutorial with some help from there and a couple of
patches. Then, I was told the tutorial in no way, shape, or form
resembles current best practices. It was written before the content
repository TCL API was complete. And although the content repository TCL
API is now complete, the tutorial has never been updated. This is a
paragraph near the beginning of the tutorial:

This tutorial uses the content repository package. This radically
simplifies the database work, but forces us to work around the content
repository's limitations, including an incomplete TCL API. So the
tutorial is messier than we'd like right now. Code that is temporary
hackage is clearly marked.

It's clear parts of the tutorial were meant to temporary. But, as long as
it's been since the tutorial has been updated those parts are bordering on
being permanent.

The rest of the documentation is in a similar shape. The front page of
the web site says 5.4.1 is the current version. The project status page,
from the link in the "About OpenACS" menu on the right hand side, says the
current version is 5.3.2. The FAQ says PDF documentation is available,
but the link from the FAQ is to a forum post, which in turn has a link to
a rough draft of some 5.2.x PDF documentation.

I asked on IRC if someone could point me towards some packages that were
examples of current best practices. I was told there are none. I even
offered to try to write a tutorial from a newbie perspective if someone
would give me some example code showing current best practices. I was
told that would be great, but no one has come forward with any code
examples. I think I've just about given up on OpenACS. A little while
back I converted one of my web sites to Django to see how I liked it. I
like it fairly well but I'm considering moving towards Ruby on Rails. I
think I like Ruby a little better than Python.

Another bit of misleading documentation - The main page on the OpenACS web
site says it's one of the most active open source projects in the world.
That would imply that there are lots of folks working on it. If that were
true, one would think some of the folks actively working on OpenACS would
concentrate on documentation, and that some would be willing to help
newbies. Of all the times I've recently visited the OpenACS web site, the
largest number of members I've seen signed on has been two. Right at the
moment, none are signed on. That doesn't sound very active.

You start installing packages, but some of them don't work (Photo
Album). You uninstall them, reinstall, and they still don't work.

I've gotten the Photo Album to work on all my installs. On my most recent
installs I couldn't get it to install from the repository. I had to
download the package manually, then install from the local files.

You browse/search the forums, and there are confusing replies ("try this
... might work") and high nosed technical discussions. A quiet
frustrating enterprise.

You couldn't be more right there.

For your need I'd recommend a CMS like Joomla or Drupal. You can install
then in no-time. They are attractive, easy to use and quiet reliable.
OpenACS is fascinating, but intended for software engineers only (in my
oppinion).

Well, I've looked at both Joomla and Drupal in the past but I don't care
much for PHP. For now Django is serving me well, and Rails might be
serving me well in the near future.

Kevin
http://www.RawFedDogs.net
http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org
Bruceville, TX

Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla!!!

Torben,

I'm going to try one more time to reply via e-mail. If that fails, I'll have to cut/paste this into the forum, so please forgive any format mangling if I have to do so. Did the server move break the notification e-mail reply system in addition to the IRC log system?

Would an OpenACS mailing list be too much to ask for? Mailing lists are so much easier to keep up with than online forums.

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, mailto:torben@dekka.net wrote:

You have valid observations and somewhat incomplete conclusions. Hopefully
these points address them.

Your points might help. Then, again, they might help further exemplify our incomplete conclusions. Sorry, I don't mean to be difficult. I see a lot of potential in OpenACS. If I could just find a few examples showing
how to get started and demonstrating current best practices, it would be great.

address. Read more about the history here:
https://openacs.org/xowiki/doc-history and coordinated efforts and addressing
it here: https://openacs.org/xowiki/Documentation_Project_Plan

Following a link on the above page to the Documentation Requirements for Developer Tutorials page:

https://openacs.org/xowiki/docs-dev-tutorial-reqs

It looks like the OpenACS community realizes the kind of tutorial I'm asking for is needed. And, it looks like they realized that back in 2003. I think the most important point listed is:

* Provide working examples that highlight the various subsystems, tcl environment ....

And, the key words in that point are ***working examples***. And, it should probably be changed to read: working examples of current best practices. The current developer tutorial isn't a working example. If one installs the current version of OpenACS, and then tries to work through the developer tutorial, the first thing that will fail will be the SQL drop script. If they're lucky enough to find the patch to get past that problem, there's at least two other problems, if I remember correctly. If one follows the "quick start" instructions on the first
page and just copies the code, only one more patch is needed to get it to work. Sorry, I don't have my notes handy right now, but I'd be happy to nit-pick my way through the tutorial again and note all the problems and
fixes I found. The quick start instructions have one copy note-procs.tcl from packages/acs-core-docs/www/files/tutorial . If one instead chooses to work through the tutorial step by step, it has one copy note-procs.tcl from packages/acs-core-docs/www/files , which is a slightly different version of note-procs.tcl, which doesn't work. If one takes the step by step route and copies note-procs.tcl as instructed in that part of the
tutorial, they'll get an error saying the required id parameter is missing when trying to add a note. In the version of note-procs.tcl copied via the quick start instructions, the add proc doesn't require an id parameter. The version copied using the instructions in the step-by-step tutorial requires an id field.

The community-based effort at documentation is most complete and accurate,
and found here: https://openacs.org/xowiki/openacs-handbook

Okay, it looks like there might be a bit of good information there. If I follow the link from that page to:

https://openacs.org/xowiki/docs-dev-tutorial

The very first link to an actual tutorial on that page points to the outdated buggy developer tutorial:

https://openacs.org/doc/current/tutorial.html

Some of the other links contains some bits and pieces of info, but I don't see anything resembling a complete tutorial as described at:

https://openacs.org/xowiki/docs-dev-tutorial-reqs

If I'm missing one somewhere, please point me in the right direction.

The openacs.org website is confusing because it is controlled by a pool
of developers, each with their own ideas. They rarely visit the parts of
the website that end-users do. They are unwilling to give publishing
control of the website to end-users who likely don't appreciate their
needs and the needs of the development initiatives of the project.

So? That might be a reason for the website being confusing, but it's not a valid excuse. Someone in the OpenACS community who has publishing control of the website needs to take charge and make an effort to keep the parts of the website that end-users visit up to date.

That has been their experience. The community documentation above, is an
effort to find balance that respects multiple perspectives that people
are coming from.

That's great, but coordinate the effort. If an up-to-date developer tutorial is created somewhere on the xowiki, change the developer tutorial link on the front page of the web site so that it points to it instead of the outdated buggy tutorial. It's not a difficult concept.

Kevin
http://www.RawFedDogs.net
http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org
Bruceville, TX

Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla!!!

Torben,

On Thu, 21 Aug 2008, mailto:torben@dekka.net wrote:

yes, apparently the email-reply broke during the server change.

Heavy sigh.

I agree with most of your statements. So, how do we go about doing them?

Get someone involved with update access to the web site to make any needed web site updates.

As for the tutorial:

Can you post your fixed tutorial version to https://openacs.org/storage ?

I don't have OpenACS installed at the moment. I can reinstall it over the weekend and go through the tutorial again to make sure I have all this right. But, if the bugs are fixed in the current tutorial there's still the problem that it's based on OpenACS as it was back before the content repository TCL API was complete. I think the following is what was needed to get the current tutorial working:

The first problem one hits with the tutorial is that the drop script will fail. The patch located at:

https://openacs.org/storage/file?file%5fid=585244

will fix that problem.

If one works through the tutorial step by step instead of just copying all the files using the "quick start" instructions at the beginning, they will eventually get to a point where it tells them to copy note-procs.tcl from
packages/acs-core-docs/www/files. For some reason, there are two versions of note-procs.tcl included in the tutorial. Both have bugs, but the one located at the above mentioned path has more bugs than the other one. So, they should copy note-procs.tcl from packages/acs-core-docs/www/files/tutorial instead.

There's also two other bugs in that version of note-procs.tcl. A discussion of them can be found in the IRC logs from July 19th, if you happen to have a local copy of the log from that date. In case there's someone who doesn't have a copy, but wants to see the log, I've put a copy at:

http://www.RawFedDogs.net/OpenACS-IRCLog-07-19-2008.txt

When one tries to add, or edit if there are notes in the database to edit, a note, one gets an "(exception NSDB, "Query was not a DML or DDL command.")" error. Derickl, on IRC, posted the following link:

http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/5789

with suggested code changes which seems to fix that problem. Code in both the add and edit procs need to be changed.

But, as I said, once the bugs are fixed, the tutorial is still outdated. Is it worth trying to fix it?

I think it would benefit from a complete rewrite. Ideally it would probably be best if the rewrite was done by someone who knows OpenACS like the back of their hand. Short of that, I made this offer on IRC and I'm still willing to give it a try. If someone would be willing to give me some example code, demonstrating current best practices, I'd be willing to try to dissect it, figure out how it works, and try to write up a tutorial from a newbie perspective. Anything I might come up with would probably
need to be polished by a member of the OpenACS community, and I'd very likely have lots of questions along the way. I think the tutorial should, at least, cover setting up a simple project that handles some type of relational data. An example I've seen used in other tutorials is a simple
book information system. Books can have one publisher and one or more authors.

Kevin
http://www.RawFedDogs.net
http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org
Bruceville, TX

Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla!!!

I meant to say _mostly_ true.