About 18 months ago I spent some time looking at OpenACS and read lots of stuff here and at photo.net and was very impressed (Hell, I was even quite excited). Right now I find myself in the situation that I need to develop a CMS system for my wife (who runs her own business). My immediate thought was to use OpenACS. However, I am not as sure as I would like to be.
My main concern is that there does not seem to be a whole lot of activity. All too frequently I look at reference material and it is 5 or 6 years old. Also, more often than I would like the reference material points to links that don't exist anymore, or refer to versions of software that is pretty out of date.
Is this because OpenACS is so mature and stable, or is it an esoteric interest of a select band enthusiasts, or is it just losing ground to younger upstarts like Plone and Mambo, or have I been insufficiently diligent in my research.
It is not my intention to cause offence in any way. It is just that we will be spending our own personal money on the development of this application (and using my own personal time). I appreciate that whatever platform I move to will involve a steep learning curve (I consider myself a competent developer - my CV would emphasise Perl, VB, C). Indeed I am looking forward to the challenge. For obvious reasons I want to find a platform I can live with for as long as possible.
The application we have in mind involves all the usual CMS stuff and will be serving customised copies of pdf documents (created on the fly using imagemagick). Phase 2 would require streaming spoken word audio and uploading customised copies of mp3 files (again created on the fly).
Should I use OpenACS?
I would appreciate any comments or suggestions.
Regards
John
