Chisimba framework
Recently I was sent link to Chisimba, a ‘Web 2.0 enabled, Free Software development framework for creating web and distributed applications’, developed by African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR). From the info on the site it looked an interesting project, although my first impression was that its trying to be all things to everyone, with modules for blogs, wikis, CMS, LMS and more. It appears to have taken elements from Moodle, Joomla, Drupal and Elgg and packaged them all into one application, which may or may not be a good thing.
On downloading and installing on my laptop, I soon found that this was still very much a work in progress, as there appeared to be lots of little bugs/annoyances that would probably have been resolved if it was a little more developed. A very minor example of this was the fact that the next/previous buttons on the installation were the wrong way round (for me anyway), with next being on the left hand side and prevous on the right, rather than the more usual arrangement. The installation itself was a little fiddly, however that was mainly because I had to upgrade my version of PHP, install some PHP libraries and some PEAR libraries too, before it would install.
A lot of effort seems to have gone into creating modules, 100′s of them by the looks of it, so thought I’d take a look at installing the blog module. Unfortunately the automatic ‘download and install’ kept giving me an error, so then tried an offline installation of the module – a 35Mb download of all(?) the modules is available – but I couldn’t find any info on how to install a module in this way. I’ve posted a query on their discussion forums, so hopefully I’ll get a reply to have this resolved soon.
Overall I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t have a proper play with the modules, but will come back to it once I get a resolution as to how to install them. Having said that I can’t see this framework taking off, there are many other established frameworks out there and I don’t think Chisimba offers anything different enough from these.
Alex,
Thanks for taking the time to have a look at Chisimba. I will take a look at the installer issue that you have mentioned, as well as your query post regarding the remote installation of modules. We are currently updating all of our package servers to work with version 3.0 of the framework, so there are still a few issues in that migration! Sorry for any inconvenience!
The Chisimba framework does, in fact offer quite a bit as differentiating features. Take for example, the module download and install (Chisimba was first to do this) as well as a number of other simple features like it. The main power in Chisimba, however, comes from the other less well known modules that simply provide some back end functoinality. Take for example the XMPP module(s), which provide social networking via IM or Jabber clients, even on mobile, or the recently completed Yahoo! Query Language over XMPP (which received many kudos from the Yahoo! and YQL development teams in fact), which allows you to build a site based on a series of instant messages through the Yahoo! data tables! Simplicity and dynamic websites taken to a whole new level.
Chisimba, in fact, has been recognised as innovative in an XMPP application so much that I will be doing a talk at OSCON 09 about it!
If you have any other questions about Chisimba or would like some more details, please let me know and I will do my utmost to help. Please also be a good Free Software citizen and forward me that list of bugs/annoyances so that we can improve the user experience for all of our users (something that we are concentrating hard on in the new version)!
Thanks
– Paul
Thanks for your message Paul, I’ve sent you an email. A
I am happy to report that all of your suggestions and issues have now been fixed in the subversion trunk and will ba available in the next release.
Many thanks for your valuable feedback!