I agree with you Joel. It was pretty easy to get up and running in ACS 3 days. It was very easy to get going.
OpenACS does have some very "groove"y things going for it. Administration is much easier than in ACS 3 days. Permissions is much slicker. Etc.
But coding is a little more difficult. In ACS 3 days, all you had to know was HTML, and SQL, and then learn some Tcl and maybe 10 API calls, and you were ready to go.
I understand why the decision was made to make things more complicated. But I'd like to think we can improve our groove a little.
- First of all, I think we need an OpenACS Wiki (now that Dave has provided this package) that lets us document in details how to use things. My docs aren't going to address every situation. Neither are Joel's. Or the official docs.
I think we then should move the tutorial section of the docs to there. That way, we can develop an easy reference for people who are getting up to speed.
I think a large part of the reason ACS was so easy was that Phil and Co. were providing so much documentation on how to do things. They wrote a book for anything that you needed to refer to, it seems like :)
I think we should also focus on finishing up the portions of the toolkit that are unfinished, like the form builder. And the documentation.
Unfortunately, most of us have to pay the bills, so this happens slower than package development.
But I'm optimistic about OpenACS' future. We're moving in a way that we weren't before. I think the groove is coming back 😊
