Opening Up The Source

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I’m a huge fan of open source software and web developments. I love the community spirit, the hackability, the freedom to customise, move and groove like its your own web baby you’re playing with (in the spirit of programming that is!).

Anyway, I’ve been toying with osCommerce for quite a while now (well, around a year to be exact) and I’m looking to implement it in two projects – strip it to the essentials, tame the beast, customise and drive. I’ve the reference to ‘beast’ once or twice… but its nothing to be afraid of.

Thats the joy of open source – you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.

Or at least I think so anyway. But then, thats just me being me.

Confident in what I can do in osCommerce – “sure yeah, thats no bother, I’ll do that” – I’ve started looking into Mambo as an open source CMS. Now, I’m not exactly the first one in the door at the Mambo party, it’s been around the block a while, but given its potential involvement in a project I’m involved in through Event Ireland

Anyway, what I’m getting at here is to highlight an article I found pretty interesting, tying osCommerce and Mambo together and taking a look under the hood at both systems for those who are unfamiliar with them.

The article was published by Water & Stone in Thailand, and originally appeared in the Bangkok Post a few months back. Click here to read the article. I’m going to do my own test installation and customisation of Mambo and we’ll see how things progress…. but if its open source, I love it already.

Update :

Well, I installed Mambo pretty easy… and then realised that the final version of Mambo, 4.5.2.3 has been replaced and is now known as Joomla… interesting. Perhaps I’m a bit slow to the Mambo game. I always preferred writing my own material or using a nuke (my, php, post etc.) based CMS…. was a relatively easy installation tho – so much to do though once you get in there!

Comments

7 responses to “Opening Up The Source”

November 15, 2005

Aidan

Well lets hope you crack it buddy! Its very interesting though, the whole open source community, I am also a very big fan, not because its often free, but because of the commuity support from fellow developers if you need assistance.

As much as we like to think it, we are all not perfect and connot expect to know everything about web development, it is so refreshing to think that if you do have a problem or just a query that you can go online and into a community network and have live assistance or at least a very detailed FAQ to help you on your way.

Lets hope open source takes over eventually and brings down the fat cats such as Microsoft.

Firefox is a fine example of a free OS and will probably very soon take over from IE unless something radcal is done, especially with Firefox having Googles backing, interesting to see the development, but even more important for us is that we will benifit from each side of the coin developing newer and better OS and Gadgets to feed our gadget hungry minds!
November 15, 2005

Ken

just be careful not to mix up OS (operating system) with open source. something is an open source piece of software, or the software is defined as being “open source”, but not “an open source”

or something like that…

if internet explorer had been created as an open source browser i don’t think we would have much of the problems we have with online browsing today. the downside for microsoft is that the coding behind IE integrates so much with other applications (media player, word, the entire office suite etc.) so there is only so much you can allow become ‘open’.

its the likes of firefox being an open source development that has driven it to become (at least) the second most popular browser on the market. a bonus that it runs cross platform as well 😀
November 15, 2005

keith bohanna

Good to see Ken!

keith
November 15, 2005

Ken

’tis indeed. got to have a light feel around it last night, relatively simple to apply content to with whats there already. interesting to see how and where the templates etc. and backend integrate with the middle!
November 15, 2005

juls

well most of that went over my head but good to see your using your resources well and having some fun along the way.
November 15, 2005

Sean

yeah i was just like what is he on! 😀 I like open source stuff.. But only because they are easy to get help with and make better etc. Dont really know much about them though! lol!
November 16, 2005

Ken McGuire

ah cheers to both of ye, juls and sean… thanks for dropping by!

as for the opensource stuff sean you should really look into it, broaden your web development ideas a little more!