So, I’ve joined yet another open source project … And I have enough of them on my back as is ;-) The project is the CMS/Framework Jaws and can be found at http://www.jaws-project.com/
Why did I join yet another OS project and why did I pick that one ? I’ve been hearing good things about Jaws and how simple it is and I really needed to find a very idot proof CMS to run a site for the company that pays me my salaray (which is not the company I work for, complicated but so it goes ;)) and that company mainly has building construction workers, I don’t doubt the guy that will be maintaining the site, he’s very eager to learn new things but I just don’t have time to teach him and since Jaws explains it self very well I think he’ll manage just fine …
Originally I wasn’t going to get involved in the project at all, then just came clear to me that some of the things needed extra feature to fit my employeers needs so I started hacking a bit and looking through the source and started asking one of the Jaws developers that I knew, meebey, and finally he just suggested me to join #jaws at Freenode and I started brainstorming and expressing my ideas and it wasn’t long until I turned into one of the developers … That’s what you get for coming with ideas! Extra coding on you back! ;D
It’s not bad tho, I like the project and people around it a lot and think it has great potentials and might even reach PostNuke/PHPNuke and Mambo in amounts of widespread usage and popularity, I think we have much thighter code behind our CMS/Framework and it keeps getting better and better.
Even tho the project is rather young it has many great Gadgets (modules) and themes but it all can be improved and done better (can’t that be done to all software anyway ?) and recenlty Jaws went through a major rewrite to make installing Gadgets easier and fruit of the developers hard work is now released, 0.5 “She’s Famous Now” go grab your copy while it’s hot at http://www.jaws-project.com/! Offical announcement at Novell Forge Jaws news section
Since I just joined the project I had little to nothing to do with 0.5, only fixed one or two notices, that’s it, so all the props goes over to the “old” Jaws devs ;)
My future works on the project will be to replace the JawsDB DBAL with MDB2 to allow for higher amount of drivers plus a better tested code and thus we can deleagte our resources into improving other things. Also I’d like to use MDB2_Schema to have a bit more portable installer else the MDB2 move would be a bit pointless ;)
Also I’d like to improve the Phoo gadget (image gallery) the search function add a forum gadget (not just a plugin to allow phpBB or fudforum) and a lot more I guess :-)
Also I’ve been playing around with the idea of having a define -> po po -> define generators to allow for better translation support in Jaws, see because Jaws uses defines to translate like so: define(‘_EN_PHOO_IMAGE_RESIZED’, ‘The image was resized successfully’);
This is maybe not the best way to handle translations, but I’m not about to change the whole project to what I think should be done ;-) I’ll start small and work my way up O:-) Anyway to make the translation more enjoyable to translators I want to allow them to hack on .po files and thus use things like poEdit but when it comes to a release we’d just simply convert those .po files over to .php files and with define(). I have some code finished which I’d like to improve, mostly just to make the translation even easier and those files even more verbose both for developers and translators. I’ll make a separtated blog post about this po -> define define -> po thing of mine since more people then Jaws could benefit from this, I hope anyway.
So now I have to make room for all this into my busy scheadule but it’s totally worth it :D
Hope all of you guys take a look at Jaws and even help us making Jaws 0.6 and higher even greater!
Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson 