Interview to MKDoc creator

MKDoc a Content Managent System (CMS), of course is Free Software, which lets you:

You can take a look at MKDoc web site

This intreview explores not Perl involvement in the product (MKDoc) as usual in these interviews, but a new angle in which you have problems with you project and how can the Open Source movement, and Perl as part of it, help to not get stuck in the sandy dunes.

Buy no more chit chat please, just lets view the juicy comment from Chris Croome, our interviewed one of this CaFe Perl issue.

Chris, please introduce yourself to the CaFe.pm group

I'm not a programmer, I do information architecture, interface design and the XML templates for MKDoc and have been invloved with MKDoc since it's inception.

Sometimes the projects run out of fuel, but the show must go on. So lets us know how was MKDoc composed and what circumstances pushed the project to a halt

It hasn't exactly halted, but it has slowed down a lot since the principal developer left last year. MKDoc was developed when there were very few web based content management systems around, it was very inovative at the time (few CMSs were concerned with accessibility and standards compliance back then). It was developed primarially because we (me and a few friends had established a small web design company back in 1996) got bored of updating web sites for clients and wanted to enable them to updated their own web sites.

We met up with a talented young Perl programmer and started developing a content management system which evolved into MKDoc. I always wanted MKDoc to be GPL'ed and although many of it's parts (like the Petal templating system) did eventually get put on CPAN it started and remained non-free until last year. This has resulted in it never having a very big user base or much of a community of users or developers around it.

The principal developer of MKDoc left last year, I won't go into the details but things were rather unpleasent in the run up to this happening.

So primarily you started the project to avoid boreness. What experienes (positive and not so) did the project left you ??

Well, I wasn't being 100% serious when I said the main motivation was to avoid doing boring tasks, but there is some truth in it -- MKDoc has been designed so that people who produce content for web sites can directly add this content and don't have to go through 3rd parties.

I don't have a good answer about what experiences I have gained from working on MKDoc, ask me in a few years time!

So, which one was the mood after the stop and which the immediate reaction ??

The immediate mood was one of relief, the first thing I did was to GPL the code, this happened the day after he left.

What points should advice you to care to anyone interested in start a new project ?? And to convert it into an Open source one ??

Agree on the license at the very beginning as this can save a lot of arguments and also do lots of research into what is already available -- it would make little sense to start a new CMS project now since there are already so many out there...

Did it help to make some modules availables on CPAN ??

The templating module (Petal, the Perl Template Attribute Language) has been a great success, there is a community around it and it's being used for many things other than MKDoc. Fixes and bug reports for this module from the community have been very helpfull. The other modules haven't taken off in the same way but this is understandable since they are not so clearly applicable for other programmes.

What extra tools gave you the MKDoc convertion to an Open source alternative ?? (can be re-written as how did the OS movement helped MKDOc and you ??)

Well without GNU/Linux, Perl and Apache and a lot of code on CPAN we would never have been able to build MKDoc with the resources we had so it's been totally indispensable.

And what happened at the end and which one is the current status for MKDoc ??

Since then development has slowed, there hasn't been so much community interest in the code -- PHP CMS's are easier to install and there are now other great codebases such as Plone available. The development in the last six month has been done specifically for clients -- when we have had the funding for additional functionality to be added we have contracted this work out.

This work has all been done on the stable (1.6) version and the next version (1.8) hasn't been progressing very fast.

What will be added to Perl/MKDoc to be installed as easy as PHP CMS's ??

Mod_perl 2 is almost out and I'd like to have MKDoc working with Apache 2/ mod_perl 2 and available in native packages for distros, rpms's for Fedora, SuSE and Mandriva, deb's for debian and Ubuntu in order that people could just add a repo to their apt or yum config and do a apt-get install mkdoc.

It still wouldn't be as easy as PHP CMSs since root would be needed but I don't think there is a way around this and it is common for mod_perl, Java and Zope based web applications, in contrast many PHP applications are designed to be used on servers without root access.

Do you have any experience (funny or not so) that you had while this process was carried out, and that want to share with us ??

I can't think of any funny anecdotes, the thing that I have the fondest memory of is changing the license -- freeing code gives one a great feeling :-)

Anything else that you want to tell us and we haven't asked you ??

Well the thing I find most interesting about the manner of production of Free software is the potential to apply this production method to the production of other things -- I think the world would be a lot better place if the mode of production of Free software was generalised and applied to the production of everything.

Conclusions (by Víctor A. Rodríguez)

I plainly have to say that without the Open Source movement, the project couldn't be carried out for a company with a size of MKDoc Ltd. where available resource are the first stopper and creative thinking is the common tool at hand for everyday use. And without freeing the code adoption and contribuition would be stopped at a null point.

The hell is not frozen, is closed source.

plants