I mentioned un-informed.org twice before in this blog. In short we want to make UN resolutions for accessible to the world. Last week I went to Helsinki for a short but very productive meeting with many people from the MCM team, the people behind the un-informed.org project. I showed them the current state of development on the backend. Thanks to Dennis we already have a more or less working Excel import, so that we could look at things with some real world data (note that in absence of a real database the team is currently using Excelsheets). The result of the meeting is that we now have finalized the requirements for a first version of the backend which we hope to complete by March 2010. Since we are hoping that additional developers will join us this month, we have a plan A for this case and a plan B if we remain a two man IT team (Dennis and myself).

In my last blog post I have explained a bit more complaints about pretty much all CMS that I have seen in the PHP space to date. Now I wonder is there any CMS I should be checking out? Note I am not so interested in a CMS that is still in its infancy, I am looking for a CMS that can have a fighting chance to compete against Drupal, ezPublish and friends in a feature checklist comparison. Actually I always wonder why Midgard gets to little attention. It seems to be based on the concept of a content repository which in itself sounds promising.

This is just a quick start for a brainstorming of what we all hate in todays CMS (I am including portal/community software here as well and I guess most also applies to web shops) software out there. I have written a very small CMS application myself ages ago so I do not have experience in what its really like writing and maintaining a big one. All I know is that its insanely painful to deal with any of them, though if your site is all about having admins managing tons of static content or end users wanting to interact, there is little way around these ugly beasts. I guess it all boils down to how to persist changes made through and admin panel. Somewhat related is the issue of scalability which to me mainly boils down to how easily can the storage logic be changed without changing the business logic on top.

So Monty now claims that Oracle is MySQL's main competitor. Given that for years MySQL AB has said the exact opposite is kinda odd. They did have a short run in with SAP but that didn't go any where .. well it resulted in MySQL loosing focus, adding tons of barely functioning features which ended up in this entire roadmap debacle we are still suffering through. Anyways the EC has thrown in their hat to stop the deal. Björn seems to share their concerns and so do many others it seems. I still don't get it. This is my attempt at clarifying my point of view and also making sure that people remember the proper terminology (stop using commercial and proprietary as synonyms).

Ok, seems like this is one of my yearly rituals: Trying to build some momentum behind PDO. So far it has remained lingering after every such attempt, not that this isn't partially at least my fault. I think last time I said I would work on the tests and in the end I didn't get anywhere. Unfortunately nobody came around to kick me for this lack of commitment and so the idea faded again. So enough with the gloom today is a fresh start and I think one thing has changed significantly since then: We have people posting patches for PDO on internals and someone (aka Matteo) that has been fairly steadily trying to close some tickets. Pierre also seems to be interested in putting in some time. Scott has always been committed to the SQLite driver and Ilia and Felipe have also been good for quite a few bug fixes in the past. So it seems we are closer than in quite some time to have the critical mass of people that care to get things going again!