By Jon Griffin

I am going to discuss what I see as a major problem with OACS and its infrastructure. Take it for what it is; an insider look at the future for OACS as told by outsiders.

How did this report come about? Well, some of my OACS sites were actually ACS sites and have been upgraded since 1999, before OACS was even a reality. I therefore have not just history, but a vested interest in OACS.

Users have always complained, but generally it was ignored. The systems worked, so don’t rock the boat. Now, though, things have changed.

By Jon Griffin

I used wordpress for a while, and since I despise mysql and don’t really like a patchy server, I quit using it. There were however many things that could be learned from it.

One of the beauties of OpenACS is that it is extremely flexible. One of the big disadvantages it that it is not on the “cutting edge” of net technology.

Due to it’s roots in the anti-commercialism’s of the webs beginnings, the “look and feel” of OpenACS has always lagged behind many LAMP applications. When I worked at ArsDigita, the general feeling was follow Tufte’s books, especially, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition and Jakob Nielson’s teachings and book (now out of print?), were required reading.

Thoughts on xowiki version .46

I have to say that with the advent of xowikiin openacs, I regained my love for using the OpenACS framework. This has to be one of the greatest additions to the wiki scene and should be the “killer” app for people thinking of using OpenACS.
xowiki doesn’t attempt to be a clone of the other wiki’s out there, but instead tries to harbor the great features of OpenACS as well as make it simple for anyone to add content to a site. It’s evolution isn’t really related to the earlier veneers on top of the content repository, but it certainly has superceded them on all levels.

By Jon Griffin
I have added my documents related to ArsDigita, OpenACS and ACS (ArsDigita Community System). They are relevant for anyone wanting to understand OpenACS, it’s history and why some design decisions were made. There are also some pearls of database programming (specifically Oracle) in these documents.

Originally ACS was only meant to run on Oracle and AOLserver (formerly naviserver). When ACS changed to it’s new version (4.0) back in 2000 (if I remember correctly), they added a hook for multiple database backends. Originally this was for the ACS/pg (later OpenACS) project.