Preface:
This is as close to an unbiased opinion that I can
come to. Having been a user of PHPNuke for quite some time now and eventually
migrating to the PostNuke system to give it a try. I still strive to maintain my ties to admin interfacthe PHPNuke community and always try to help fellow nukers whenever possible. .
This comparison of PHPNuke and PostNuke is mine and mine alone. It doesn't not necessarily reflect that of the PHPNuke community or that of the PostNuke community. So please if you disagree with my statements don't direct them
at one or the other of the CMS systems direct them at me.
Documentation
PostNuke
The
Documentation on PostNuke at first was simply the PHPNuke documentation.
However within a short period of time the documentation
was written anew and it was good, thorough and professional.
As of lately there have been a few speed bumps
with
the documentation as with any open source project. However it looks as if those issues are being worked out and
the documentation should
be well on track by the 1.0 release.
PHPNuke:
The
Documentation on PHPNuke is spartan in nature and that is to be
expected of a one man development team. The files give you instructions on
how to install or upgrade the product as well as some decent coverage once the
program is running on other various features. While the documentation does
fit the bill it's nothing to get excited over.
Bug System tracking
PostNuke
PostNuke
currently tracks bugs using the Source Forge Bug tracking system. This is a wonderful tool that systematically records and tracks any bug
submitted by a registered user or an anonymous one.
In addition to this there are forums and directly after the release period the staff is on standby at the site to answer questions posted as comments to the release statement. Overall all but the few really weird bugs are repaired within a 24-hour period, which lends great support to the success of PostNuke.
PHPNuke
This is a sore subject with me as I started out using PHPNuke.
In the beginning PHPNuke had a very active mailing list that the author killed, against the objections of the majority of users, as he wanted everything moved to the forums. Now the forums are gone as they had problems and the author for whatever reason chose to drop them. The Mailing List was never restarted and support went away from the
official site. There appears to be no official
support for any of the PHPNuke bugs that are found and it is all taken care of
by the community at large.
All of this I assume stems from a number of
factors.
#1 the authors inability to keep up with all of the
moving pieces (and there are a lot of moving pieces)
#2 Script kiddies bombarding forums and the e-mail list
with their generally unpleasant comments about this or that.
#3. A large amount of bugs in a system that was not
tested aggressively before implementing it on a production level site.
#4.
The sudden surge in membership and overall site traffic on a site manned
by a staff of one (1)
Currently
there is no OFFICIAL bug tracking system for the PHPNuke project that is known
to the author. The site admin may
be reading 3rd party forums or he might not but this is a feature sorely lacking
on the part of PHPNuke.
Installation Script
PostNuke
This
is a nice topic and a relatively new one.
The
concept is that you need not know a lot about sql to set it up. The PostNuke
install.php script
tries in a mostly successful manner to create the database or upgrade any PHPNuke
database from 4.4 all the way up to the 5.01.
If this fails there is a
backup plan for those upgrading only (and this is not OFFICIAL)
Hidden outside the
html directory of the source package is a developer's CVS update script.
It is soon to be incorporated into the install.php script but its current
function is to upgrade whatever it finds in a current PostNuke beta database with new table
information. In both cases if you
are upgrading BACKUP YOUR FILES AND DATABASE first.
This is all still new so something could go wrong.
PHPNuke
No
install script
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