On Open Sourcing slate
April 3rd, 2007 — 1:34 pm —With the publicity of TEH a number of folks have noticed our cms, slate. Along with that have come questions like “Where can I download it?” or “Is it going to be open sourced?” First off, we’re very flattered that people would see the screenshots and be interested enough in the project to email us. Second, I’m afraid that we won’t be open sourcing slate in the short-term. Long-term it’s a definite possibility but we have one big reason why we haven’t released it to the wild yet.
It’s not mature enough
It kills me to say it and I’m sure it’ll kill Chris to read it (a little bit at least). Over the last year we’ve learned a lot from running our own pretty complicated project and watching a few others. Trust me, slate isn’t ready for primetime outside of WVU. That’s not to say it isn’t already a good product. It definitely is which is why we have it in production. But is it easy to customize? Tested on various platforms? Have documentation? No, no, and no. These are all things that a project needs when it’s open sourced if it’s going to attract developers and really be a success. It also needs some further seasoning and refactoring. We’re still dropping into the depths of the system and ripping bits apart. See the current upgrade to Rails 1.2.3 as a prime example.
I don’t want slate to be the first Rails CMS to market and Radiant has us beat anyway but, when released, I want it to be the best. When we do release it, trust me, it will be.
Some people may simply have questions about how we’ve done something in slate (e.g. how we’re doing the draft vs. production content). Just drop us a comment and we’ll try to do a write-up for the blog on it. While we won’t be sharing the entire code-base hopefully we can share some know-how.
About slate
slate is a content management system (CMS) developed using Ruby on Rails focused on rapid production of traditional websites created by WVU Web Services. Read more about why we created slate and a longer list of features of slate. You can also check out a list of sites using slate. If you have questions or comments let us know but if it's a question about open sourcing slate have a look at this article first.Archives
Recent articles
- No Wonder Rails Is Default in Mac OS X Server...
- Good News: An Open Sourced slate Is Coming
- The WVU Open Source License
- Implementation idea: .do templates
- Keeping slate Humming - Part 1
- Campfire for Design & Keeping Your Tag Cloud Running
- Custom configuration settings made easy
- HOW-TO: Add a Gallery to Your Site
- JSONRequest.post Example
- Miscellaneous
Articles
There are a few places (just from slate blog posts) that intrigue me as to how things are accomplished. I don’t fully understand how the routing works, as Chris has mentioned a time or two how complicated it gets. I’m a very curious person, and so I love to read about how others handle situations, even if it doesn’t pertain to me whatsoever.
I’ll be staying tuned in for upcoming posts concerning “how things are done in slate,” so hopefully you guys are able to write them.
Congrat’s on your progress so far.
I’m very interested in how you are handling two key aspects of a real CMS: versions and stages (draft/preview/production/etc). Could you elaborate on that?
Thanks in advance,
Adrian Madrid
I looks promising. Although you stated that it’s not mature enough to open source, it maybe is a good idea to do. A lot of people agree on ‘release often, release fast’.
The good news is we’re releasing early and (relatively) often here at WVU :) So we’re getting a lot of experience with the software.
My argument back is, we release slate “early” without much documentation and no way for a dev to easily customize it, people get excited about it, use it, note that they can’t figure out how to change things, we get inundated with requests, people get pissed off or people hack it and then we change something critical (since it’s not mature), and it just… fails.
To me, in this case, caution and a later release makes more sense. When we have all our ducks in a row we’ll release it. Thanks for the note.
Thank you for taking pride in your work and deciding to wait until you have things in some semblance of order before releasing your code.
After 13 years, I am so sick of people releasing 10% completed (not JUST CODE) projects.
My analogy for this is preparing oneself for going into the public every day. There are an enormous number of OSS projects “walking around the grocery store in their underwear”.
Nobody is asking these projects to spend 2 hours to meticulously shave, bathe, condition their hair, clip toenails, iron clothes, get a haircut, and take etiquette classes… but for God’s sake at least take a shower if you smell, throw ANY damn clothes on, and flatten your “duck tail” of hair that is sticking up from sleeping all night.
exactly.
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