> ...a week...
It does not take a week to have a running system: it might well take much longer and, just to witness an extreme case, I happen not to have been able to install it at all. How was it possible? Well, you all are supposed to be smart, skilled, informed, trained, and have plenty of time. In my case, I'm just an ignorant.
OpenACS (ACS, actually) was originally built, and meant to be used, by active and proficient developers. And things still are the same, now: which means that, unless you are a developer, and rather practiced, you cannot adopt OpenACS, probably. Daemontools, tDOM, Linux, regular expressions, AOLserver, tcl, PostgreSQL, OpenFTS, qmail, and tons of other quite technical things... It's a wonderful tangle. By the time I started learning something, things changed, versions evolved, and I had to start from scratch again. At every step the path splits in two, and then branches again, and again, and you find yourself asking things through the net, and studing the most disparate things,... You might laugh at me for I've not even been able to install debian by myself. But this is not the point, here.
I experienced, right in this place, the most kind and helpul people. Nevertheless, I am forced to admit that the most basic requirement for the toolkit is still lacking: an easy install. And, writing "easy" I just mean that. Such a point of view is quite possibly not fully understood by the many of you who are computer expert.
Today, many tools have been shaped to allow *everybody* (literally) to run a richly featured database-driven site.
OpenACS is maybe sound, no doubt better than other products, but it seriously risks to left behind. It risks to be left to an élite. I am afraid that Luis Garcia was quite right.
Luigi
P.S. Some may ask why I'm still here... 😊
