Surprising… until today, there is no wish-list from user yet. Is it AMS development stalled too long until no one put hope on it anymore ? I hope thats didn’t true. AMS is a great module with a lot of potential.

Since there is no wish from user, I have 1 immediate wish. I wish AMS can support all XOOPS editor (textarea, dhtml,htmlarea,koivi, FCKeditor and TinyMCE). Currently AMS only support koivi. So, during the weekend, i put some effort to make it work… and surprisingly its work like a charm . There is only 1 minor problem, TinyMCE didn’t obey the height that I put. Look like its bugs in tinyMCE, not AMS itself. I don’t want to put effort on this issue yet, but maybe later I’ll do that and give the feedback to original developer to update it. I also heard SPAW editor also already ported to XOOPS. However, its not bundle with xoops editor package yet, so I’ll wait and see 1st.
During weekend, I also take some time to resync my local work with SVN. So now public SVN already have the source code until AMS 2.42 Final. For AMS 2.50 Beta 1 source code, I didn’t commit anything yet since I have a few more features to update.

The real problem now is there is another big project just around the corner. When the time come, I’ll be busy and most probably didn’t have enough time to complete and publish AMS 2.50 Beta 1 in April. Its will ruin my AMS roadmap (not publish to public yet).

I want to start my 1st entry with 1 statement:

“While programming is our strength, but XOOPS and graphic design is a really the stopper”

As all of world know, AMS 2.41 development stopped since 2005. Why we wait 2 years before take over the development role and why we take another 6 moth to comeout with AMS 2.42 Final after AMS 2.42 RC1 had been release to public (since end of September 2007). I’ll address some issue here, so we can share the opinion.

Problem 1 : Lack Of XOOPS documentation

AMS 2.41 development had been stopped by IT-HQ since 2005, and as AMS 2.41 user, we really feel disappointed. AMS module have a lot of potential and we really like it compared then other article/news management. Its really fast and have really unique and useful features like Audience, Spotlight and newbb/CBB integration.

We have good PHP programming skill, but we have almost 0 knowledge regarding XOOPS module development. Unfortunately, XOOPS have very little documentation and its stop us to develop the module ourself. I really think thats a big weakness for XOOPS. The XOOPS developers always cry saying nobody help them and most of the module had been develop and maintain by single person only. To make that worse,in a lot of cases, the actual fact is 1 programmer maintain multiple modules. Thats will slow down the development and effect the programmer moral. Over the time, the programmer moral go down til -ve and that module abandoned.

I believe the process repeated again and again. Thats why XOOPS have hundreds of great modules , but had been abandoned by original programmer. Some of them continued to be maintain by other people, but most of them just buried inside the module repository. Don’t blame us… blame yourself. XOOPS have so liitle documentation and its not enough to make new comer like us to gain that competency. Of course some senior programmer said, “u can open any module source code and study how they program it”, but the actual reality, who gonna do that especially when you already have full time work. Contrast to Drupal, they have better documentation, but I don’t want to touch about it (this is XOOPS development site, anyway)

To shorten my entry… we take 2 years before gaining confident to continue AMS module development due to lack of documentation by XOOPS. For XOOPS core team… if you read this entry, please do something.

Problem 2 : No latest AMS source code

When IT-HQ agree to hand over AMS development to us, we only have the same source code that all of you have. AMS 2.41 with bugs . IT-HQ don’t have SVN/CVS or their latest build. So, we need to hunt over all the IT-HQ forums post to get user bugs report and wish list. Some of the problem had been solve by IT-HQ, but since we have no AMS latest build, we need to re-do it.

Problem 3 : XOOPS 2.2.x support

From all of the bugs reported, the one that takes quite significant of our effort is to make it work with XOOPS 2.2.x. Thats double the effort we need to spent since XOOPS 2.2.x and XOOPS 2.0.x is not compatible each other + no documentation.

Problem 4 : Module CLONE ability

After AMS 2.42 RC1, we plan to make the module clone-able. So, insteade of MUST put in “/modules/AMS”, user can put it on “/modules/ANYTHING-YOU-WANT/”. After a lot of struggle (due to lack of documentation), we decide to drop it and straight away release AMS 2.42 FINAL. So, public can’t really see the benefit and looks like we take too long to release the FINAL version.

Problem 5 : Development Website

Yes… it is really a problem. believe it or not, it takes more then 50% of our time ! The BOSS want everything perfect, want good themes, good bug tracker and good collaborative site. So we spend a lot of time try multiple bug tracker with SVN integration, design the themes etc. Since its not our strength, especially to design themes, our theme design is SUCKS and re-do again and again. Later, since we delay too long we decide to release without all of those cosmetics. Thats why you can see this site actually simple, using default theme and no dedicated bug tracker with SVN integration. Regarding bug tracker with SVN integration, we need to drop it since our shared hosting didn’t allowed it .

However, next few weeks/month, possible we will come out with new theme, modified from ruffdog. They already give the green light to us to copy their design