Seems it is very hard to spread the news about CMSity around the world, and acquire some user base of this project. Till now I did few commercial deployments of CMSity, however the cmsity.com page hits look really miserable.

I wrote mails to many CMS magazines asking to drop a note about my project. However only two of them replied and posted something on their sites about CMSity. So I still miss some more reviews that can put a breathe into the project. But it seems my mails are ignored by majority of big CMS related sites making very hard to promote new project like CMSity nowadays.

Since I believe this software presents great value and outperforms other popular solutions I consider releasing it as open-source, however probably not GPL but some license that will force the code to stay by the author (me), deny all the forks, making all community changes happen to be included in the source code base.

Open-source is a great idea, but I have seen too many projects that were just bloated, forked and spoiled by masses of developers that were just about put something of themselves in the project regardless of quality of the included changes, missing overall sense and directions of the project itself. That is why I decided to keep the code closed initially, while giving the licenses for free, but it seems non-open source project are just kicked out of the focus today, and releasing the source code is a “must” to gain the momentum.

After spending few years using WordPress, MODx, PHPnuke I found out those systems getting more and more complicated, well yes sophisticated too, but first of all complicated. Anyway, feeling that this is not right direction I have decided to rewrite something by my own; simple, but powerful enough to provide functionality that you expect from most of the modern sites – blog, forums, RSS feeds.

Such functionality was requested by few of my clients, asking me: “Adam, we need something like WordPress, but we would like to have forums too, also site should be multi-lingual and finally we would like to limit the access to some parts of the site.” Just to mention those clients were running websites at PHP virtual hosting. I said, “Roger that” and started looking for some (any) CMS that could satisfy their needs.

I use to browse for new CMSes time to time. I did it again last October. Nothing new. Okay, maybe I could somehow tailor MODx, or WordPress. Nah. Then I found BBpress, well I was excited. A forum system made by WordPress creators, that integrates with WP. Great! Maybe this will fit.

Unfortunately I was hitting so many problems syncing WP and BBpress user database and logins, cookies (Why the hell it is so complicated?), so I gave it up.

I decided to write my own system, having in mind that forum, blog, they just differ at presentation level! There is always some parent page and subpages, post and replies, forum and topics. All having some hierarchy relations, and different presentation model. So why we have to install BBpress over WP if it is just a matter of presentation. Forum should look more like a table… while blog more like list of post excerpts. Why we cannot just turn WP sub-blog into the forum?

The difference is the presentation

So thing that makes forum or blog special is the way it is presented to the user. But from structure point of view both are the same. So this is the idea of the CMSity. For CMSity all pages (document tree nodes) are the same, they just carry the type which is used to determine what template to use to render them – what is their presentation.

Why PHP? Even I know more optimized/fast languages such as Ruby (1.9 is really fast), Java, C++.. started learning Erlang, still PHP is kind of standard that is present on most of the web servers and you can expect your clients will have PHP on their web servers. So I have chosen PHP; not really my favorite language, but the one I know pretty well and have spent quite a while with.

So this is genesis of CMSity… hope it will find many users and will be useful for you all.

• Project files and binaries were upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 (SP1).
• Installer now checks the runtime properly on Windows Vista & Windows 7 Beta, was tested also on Windows XP & 2003. Moreover since Visual Studio 2008 runtime seems to be present by default on many machines, most of you will not need to install it manually at all.
• Installer now contains OpenSSL 0.9.8j, so no more problems with OpenSSL external installation.
• … finally we got all the fixes and features introduced in jabberd2 till the revision #752.

Once you upgrade, you may uninstall Visual Studio 2005 Runtime and OpenSSL using Add/Remove Programs if you have them installed just for older jabberd2 win32 build.

Changes:

• FIX: Setup files were not anymore compatible with latest WiX 3 beta
• FIX: Router failing opening users and filters configuration in Windows
• FIX: Mysql missing crypt is replaced with DES_crypt from OpenSSL in Windows
• NEW: Compressed stream support via zlib
• NEW: Keep server.pem on upgrades
• NEW: Using SubWCRev from TortoiseSVN for version files generation (instead of xsltproc)
• NEW: All configuration files are now generated on build by Perl from generic distribution ones
• NEW: Using udns library for Windows builds too (resolver component was removed)
• UPDATE: Synced config.h with the one from generic builds

All changes are visible as SVN revisions 644-688 in the repository.

Please note new build prerequisites such as udns, zlib, Perl and TortoiseSVN for manual builds.

Recently I’ve received two papers from GNU (originated from U.S.) and few great stickers with gnus I had to sign it back after carefully studying them. And now I am officially assigned and my changes went to the official repository.

Can I call myself genuine OpenSource developer now !?

Fortunately Adium, the great Mac OS X IM client, made me remember, as it was regularly complaining about inability to make a connection to my company XMPP server running jabberd2 Windows version of mine. Also Tomasz Sterna, current maintainer of jabberd2, pointed me some win32 bugfixes hanging on mailing list. So there’s an interest in what I’m doing here! It is alive! Alive!

Going back to the subject, I’ve sat myself for a few (or little more) hours back to Windows and Visual Studio, made latest trunk compile properly in Visual Studio 2005 and finally killed all those annoying bugs that made jabberd2 win32 so unstable. So here it is, you can find brand new build.. working with Adium, and the others I hope. Still you need to remember to install VS2005 and OpenSSL runtimes before running my installer or it gonna fail. I hope I can make it somehow better soon, like having some message popping up about those runtime libraries in the installer.

Also as a side-effect of my work there are Visual Studio 2005 compatible versions of libgsasl and libidn there in the downloads, so hope I did something good for the community and I can sleep well now. Good night.

Now it is fixed in both SVN and downloads of jabberd2 win32. Sorry for the problem, now I hope you can enjoy at last jabberd2 for Windows installer.

It is not yet super-perfect, however it respects upgrades, also it will NOT overwrite your existing jabberd2 configuration nor database files.

Installer running on fresh jabberd2 free system will ask for XMPP domain during setup process and install running jabberd2 configuration using SQLite backend for authentication and storage with registration enabled. After installation remember you need to restart jabber2comp service every time you change comp.xml file (where comp may be s2s, c2s, router, resolver or sm).

Running installer over existing jabberd2 installation will result only with upgrading binary files and writing new *.dist.xml files next to existing *.xml ones.

Have fun with jabberd2! Don’t forget to install Visual C++ 2005 Runtime Libraries prior running the setup.

Several users already confirmed running jabberd2 on Windows server platform with success (I am running it also at my company). And now mu-conference component will be nice addendum to this light XMPP server suite, as together with jabberd2 all takes ~6MB on the disk with no extra software required!

P.S. Windows MSI installer is also on the way. Soon jabberd2 XMPP server installation will be even easier.

I hope this will help to popularize XMPP somehow. I presume that free 3MB setup will be something that everyone can try installing at their office next to MS Exchange server, at least just to put e-mail/XMPP instead of just e-mail in the footer We just need to make Jabber trendy.. heh ?