What’s not to like about open source? A group of developers working together to create free software built to answer the needs of the public. Need support? There’s a dedicated group of geeks maintaining forums that you can simply log into and ask a question. Everybody’s happy and helpful in Open Source Software Land!
Well, not really. We first experimented with OSS when our clients started asking for content management (CMS) and e-commerce services. We experimented with Post Nuke and Mambo in the CMS world and OS Commerce and Zen-Cart in the E-Commerce world. With the CMS solutions, all seemed pretty good with both until we turned the sites over to our clients. Both CMS systems we used turned out to be not so user-friendly for computer newbies. A little to much, “to do this, do this, then this, then this and this” to suit the occasional user. Both worked great for clients that had lots of posts and activities and a dedicated employee to take care of these tasks. But for the occasional user, we’d get the “Now how do I do this again?” phone calls so often we actually started just doing the posts for them.
The E-Commerce situation was a little different. We first used OS Commerce until we discovered Zen Cart, an OS Commerce spinoff. We loved it’s flexibility and the ability to customize the look and features… until we began to notice that we pretty much had to tweak every setting and touch every button to get a site that answered our clients needs. And the more customized the site was, the bigger pain in the ass it was to update.
Our final breaking point with OSS came when we migrated to a new server. Never an easy task, we found that the migration which included an update of PHP and MySQL services, broke every open source app we had online. We had started using ExpressionEngine by then to do most of our CMS work and all those sites migrated without an issue. Then came the US Postal Service rate hike… the first couple of updated shipping modules for Zen Cart didn’t work properly and the subsequent updates were awkward to apply. To make matters worst, the default download for Zen Cart STILL hasn’t been updated with the new shipping module… and nowhere does the documentation mention that.
And those droves of dedicated developers manning the forums? Well, mostly the forums seem to be packed with fans and haters with the poor “I got a problem” folks getting stuck in the middle of the battling factions. When I say we’re over the open source software thing I truly mean it.
About 3 years ago I discovered Veerle Pieter’s blog. She introduced me to ExpressionEngine through her praise of this amazing software. It’s amazingly flexible and, with a little effort to learn it’s ways, can do an incredibly wide variety of things. Best of all, it can be customized to be very user friendly. All our clients love it. Yes it costs money, but one generally gets what one pays for.
As for E-Commerce we’re in transistion. I was quite surprised to get a response from Veerle all those years ago when I asked what she used for E-Commerce. She replied, “We usually just build them custom as we’re not satisfied with anything available on the market.” I thought girlfriend must be crazy to do that! Now I see the wisdom in her statement. We’ve learned that although some aspects are standardized in E-Commerce such as checkout and payment and shipping modules, almost everything about the actual product management is SO different from client to client that we spend an extraordinary amount of time tweaking and twisting existing softwares to meet our client’s needs. So now we’re building our own using the Ruby on Rails framework.
What’s the lesson in all this? I guess it’s that anything you get for free is worth exactly what you paid for it.