Crisis? What Crisis?
All projects have a tough time sooner or later. The toughest one for XOOPS was probably 2007, when the community members found themselves without a project leader, without a development team and without the source code.
Although things seem going full swing now for them, at this moment XOOPS looked like a sinking boat, and this was very bad news for me. My customers needed support and there were projects on the table that had to be done and had to be done on time. I couldn't wait. I discovered XOOPS EXM. It was the same XOOPS with a much prettier admin panel. I used it for two projects and "saved the day", but the XOOPS crisis was still there, so I started considering moving to other systems.
I had invested three years learning XOOPS at this moment, and I was slowly moving from asking in the forums to giving responses, that is, just when I started giving back to the community, I had to move on. I didn't like the idea, but business don't wait, so I did what was needed. I researched the market and see what was hot at this moment. I didn't wan't to find just a XOOPS substitute, if I was going to learn a new system, it had to be much better. I read docs, surfed forums, installed and tested many systems: XoopsCube (stuff for geeks), Xaraya (insanely customizable), CMS Made Simple (looked like a XOOPS with common sense) and Drupal , among others. Of these two, Xaraya and Drupal promised to be able to move me to the 'next level' if I was ready to learn.
Xaraya was insanely complex and Drupal's community was much bigger. Although I liked Xaraya, Drupal seemed more solid for my business, so it won the match. I used it to built a site for a real estate company and it was an amazingly solid choice. Drupal can be insanely complicated, but if you want flexibility, there is no better choice. I was saved.
Then, suddenly, ImpressCMS appeared. A new promising XOOPS fork that promised to save my investment in XOOPS while moving forward. I could update my customers to ImpressCMS if they required more features, and I could recycle my knowledge and my own hacked XOOPS modules for projects that required same things as past projects, letting me have more stuff done in less time. And thing that convinced me was that Marc-André Lanciault, the project leader, was a coder and a businessman at the same time, and his business was based on XOOPS technology. He had the same problem as me, the XOOPS management crisis was hurting his business. ImpressCMS was not just a hobby for him, for the health of his business it had to work.
Oh, yes, I was saved. I had looked at the neightbour's grass, and it wass greener. I had never realized this if it wasn't for the XOOPS management crisis.
The grass was greener on the other side.
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