[Glastonbury] (no subject)

[Sean Miller]

> There is a very interesting thread on Slashdot regarding a Lib Dem
> Councillor (who used to work for Microsoft) and his reasons for
> recommending that Cambridge City Council should use proprietary rather
> than FLOSS software.

I have been having all sorts of fun with "Mambo Open Source" since Friday.
Slowly, but surely I am getting there... I have re-written the template
script to work differently on certain pages, I have fixed some problems
with variable "bleeding" (ie. if you went to a certain page, then to
another the latter used the variables set in the former rather than its
own local ones), tweaked the security module, fixed some buttons that did
not work, and successfully implemented multi-timezone support and
consistent date formats across the news pages (this is apparantly one that
would be fixed in the beta coming on Wednesday, but my version has treed
sufficiently now that I wouldn't want to go back to a "virgin"
installation).

Yes, it's frustrating when software doesn't work -- but at least with Open
Source you can do what I have done... spend a couple of days hacking the
code to make it work, rather than wait for a "patch release" from somebody
like Micro$oft that might take weeks (if not years) to arrive.

...but you do have to be prepared to do it. Often the stable releases
(especially in Mambo's case) are so far behind the bleeding edge that in
being conservative you lose features you want. Hence to get the best of
all worlds you need not only the time but the ability to hack code.

Sean (rapidly heading towards become an open source community developer --
I can see the trend developing, and I think under GPL I have to publish my
code changes)