After months of working with ACS 4.x I recently picked up OpenACS at `stable' version 5.1.4. As some might know I've been an active member of the OpenACS community for several years now and as such am quite familiar with the internals of OpenACS.
Even installation of OpenACS core required patches to run on PostgreSQL 7.3, which by OpenACS's policy should be a supported version.
After installation, tsearch2_driver required a patch to work with PG 7.3. Lars-blogger fails when setting up blogs for several users. You might say that these are small problems, but I found them very discouraging. Compounded with administration navigation that appears to be designed without rhyme or reason was enough of an incentive to look for a different web development framework.
Not that these specific bugs/gripes are so bad that I feel compelled to look around. No, it is the fact that after all these years OpenACS still produces questionable releases, has outdated documentation, lacks comprehensive support for SOAP, relies on a legacy ecommerce solution with a fair share of warts (no offence Torben) and has trouble supporting even 2 databases.
Things I'll miss most about OpenACS? AOLserver, tDOM and the templating system.
I haven't forsaken OpenACS, but OpenACS is losing its appeal. And in that respect I'm with Talli's comments on .LRN. As a developer it also makes economic sense to look at more mainstream tools/languages, especially when those tools solve the same problems just as well.
/Bart
