I haven't blogged for a while because this blog
is still hosted on a server that hasn't received payment since my payment
subscription ended over a month ago, and I don't want to just set up the same
old blog software on the new host I've already arranged. EDIT: Meh I've decided to build my own blogging/social engine and I'm doing this during my free time.
So remember a while back I mentioned I'd move
this blog to Orchard?
It's not that I haven't gotten around to
setting up Orchard yet. It's that I am having a huge amount of difficulty
embracing it. Besides the fact that it has an incredibly steep learning curve--and
then still v1.x level capability once the knowledge plateaus--there is
something critically wrong with Orchard that I'm still getting past, and that
is the size and attitude of its current community.
A good blogging
platform--CMS, whatever you want to call it--will be "hackable" to
conform to the proprietary needs of its user. On the technical side, Orchard is
perfect for this because it is "just an ASP.NET MVC application", and
they tout it as such, up until they actually see ASP.NET MVC developers
tackling and hacking it. And yes I can take Orchard's source code and hack at
it to meet whatever requirements I have. Personally, I think that this is the
only real-world scenario for Orchard anyway simply because it's still v1.x and
is still painfully lacking in feature detail.
But its community so far consists of a very
small handful of people, and several of them are paid--whether directly or
indirectly--by Microsoft. So there has proven to be a very large wedge between
those who actually know the platform inside and out and those who, like me, are
trying to learn the platform--very few who know the platform well from a
development standpoint but are just end users, because Orchard is still so
new--and the wedge between these two groups is not just one of knowledge but
also of culture and attitude. Those who are maintaining Orchard are insistent
that people stay in the box that Orchard constructs. This is so completely not
the attitude of a typical open source software developer. Most OSS developers see
breaking out of a prebuilt box--especially when the box is still a 1.x
"greenfield" project--as a huge and wonderful challenge worth
conquering. "Going rogue" with the platform is something that is
often embraced by a platform because it highlights the pliability of the
platform or else reveals opportunities for improvement.
And I would play my part
in seeing this "box breakout" opportunity to be a challenge worth
conquering, but every time I sit down to continue to learn the platform and
understand its limitations and possibly some seam points I might introduce, I
have to ask myself, What's the payoff besides getting my
site set up the way I want it? Because I'll admit, my biggest
motivation to delve into Orchard is to be an expert in Orchard and to be a
useful participating member of its community, so this is not just an investment
in the technology but in the community.
So then I ask myself, is
the community worth investing in? It is if I'm willing to be
the only rogue participant trying to
figure out how to break out of the originally intended design and just use the
parts of it that I want to use but still ultimately have my own ASP.NET MVC
site with an Orchard back-end in certain places. But I'm not willing to be the
only rogue. So that leaves me looking like a jerk calling these guys
jerks, because they freak out at the notion of using Orchard in a way for
which it was not originally intended. (They're not jerks, by the way, and
neither am I, I'm just saying it looks something like me being a jerke
calling them jerks because tensions rise and a lot of bickering occurs when
they can't get past overall intentions and strategy while I'm trying to address
a specific technical scenario.)
So perhaps Orchard is not what I want to use,
I'm still unsure, and believe me I have pondered just writing my own blog
engine (again), but let me be clear: it is not because the Orchard technology
isn't a good fit for me, rather it is because the people aren't a good fit for
me. They are delivering a product that they think should be used as-is with
their own proprietary methods of extending and tweaking (rather than ASP.NET
MVC methods of extending and tweaking which again ASP.NET tweaks are in my
opinion completely appropriate) and they don't want to help people twist it
around and see their hard work made "ugly" or for that matter
"insufficient". It's only human to be protective of your investment
and its public image, but it's just not a realistic attitude to have when
you're still a young 1.x platform less than a year old that still needs to
build up a strong community and documentation is still lacking.
Meanwhile, the more I look at WordPress the
more I like it. Its core technology isn't much for an ASP.NET developer to look
at, but everything else about
WordPress is really growing on me, I'm tempted to call it
"wonderful". I could sit here and talk about WordPress's
wonderfulness for some time but the reality is that everyone who would read
this tech blog already knows all about WordPress and if not then just go create a basic
WordPress blog yourself, it's free.
In fact, I was working on setting up another
site for a friend this week and I used WordPress to do it, and after weeks of
frustrations with Orchard and its bland 1.x workflow I must confess that I
really just about lost it when I worked in WordPress, it is really just such a
nice experience. Granted, the site is actually just a plain-vanilla
WordPress.com site (not a Wordpress.org full deployment) so it's not like I had
a lot of customizations I could do here that I wasn't able to do or figure out
in Orchard, so much as the beautiful experience of working with WordPress
itself and the rich configurability of WordPress made the disappointment of
WP's limited customization flexibility all just wash away.
I can't see myself becoming a PHP programmer
consultant touting WordPress, I've had a couple false starts, but the notion
has been on the table for nearly a year now, and after trying (albeit not very
hard) to work with Orchard I don't think I can get around it.
The best part about WordPress is that it can
run in .NET using Phalanger. And I'm seriously considering
toying with the idea of abandoning Orchard for WordPress-on-Phalanger-on-.NET.