Porting Chisimba functionality to Joomla and Wordpress

[Derek Keats]

Hi folks,

This is for me a sad moment, it was my dream of a surviving African FOSS collaboration. But, with UWC no longer involved, and other projects having moved on, my focus now firmly on business innovation and strategy with almost no time for software development, I have to admit that it is now no longer feasible to keep it alive.

The functionality that I use in Chisimba, I am porting to Wordpress and Joomla. It is interesting that Joomla 3, the new Joomla is only now claiming functionality that was in Chisimba years ago, and adding features that were literally a few hours to develop using the Chisimba canvas system. We were way ahead of the game! I have already converted some of the filters to Wordpress plugins. 

It makes sense to do this, because when we started Chisimba was way ahead of them, but now - with our community gone - they have moved way ahead, or are very close to doing so. Unless there are strong objections, I will be shutting down chisimba.com. dkeats.com will continue to use Chisimba for now, as will one or two other on-going projects. 

The code is still there and there is a lot of functionality, if anyone can bring it back to life, I will gladly start using it again. But for now, it does not make sense to continue flogging what is essentially a dead horse. 

regards

derek

--
Dr Derek W. Keats, PhD
IT Strategy, FOSS, Technology Innovation

Kenga Solutions Pty Ltd
2 Hollywood Drive, Northcliff, Johannesburg
Email: de...@dkeats.com
Phone: +27 82 787 0169 / +27 11 477 4954
Web: http://www.dkeats.com

[Elijah Omwenga]

Hi Derek,

Happy 2014!

Is it possible to produce a book and a youtube documentary to feature on the site for a while? To chronicle and tell the story of this unique collaboration?

All that we did was never for nothing. We have learnt lessons, we have learnt skills and we have gained international recognition. There will be a special place in history for all these greats things that happened in Africa!

Many blessings,

Elijah 

[Derek Keats]

On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 11:54 AM, Elijah Omwenga <eomw...@uonbi.ac.ke> wrote:

Hi Derek,

Happy 2014!

Is it possible to produce a book and a youtube documentary to feature on the site for a while? To chronicle and tell the story of this unique collaboration?

Yes, it is possible, provided someone will do it. 

All that we did was never for nothing. We have learnt lessons, we have learnt skills and we have gained international recognition. There will be a special place in history for all these greats things that happened in Africa!

Funny thing is I am looking at Joomla for replacing Chisimba on http://corallinales.com and the current Chisimba CMS module is so much better! I do think it was a waste that people never had the guts to implement it in their own environments.

d

[Derek Keats]

Me again...

I decided to stick with Chisimba. It is a way better code base to work with  and way more flexible than any of those other ghastly things I mentioned. I have worked with them now, and I am singularly impressed by how unimpressive they are.

To that end, I am going to keep chisimba.com alive for now, just in case someone does decide to play with it. I am also going to keep dkeats.com running on Chisimba. 

Hence, I am going to move it Chisimba.com to a newer server (currently running Ubuntu 11.04) and update it to the latest code base. I have copied the database, userfiles, and config, and am testing on my local host before I move it to my largest Digital Ocean cloud server in New York. Because it is so many versions behind, I have to do some database tweaking locally, then I will move it over.

Given that I have a few other things to do today, the site may disappear for a couple of hours or more. This will also stop the database crashing because that old rackspace server doesn't have enough memory (only 512 Mb) to run both the database and the app server. My bigger Digital Ocean Server has 8Gb RAM, and has no spinning disks, so it will be a lot faster.

So, it will live a little longer, and I will stick with it for the Corallinales.com project as well.

regards

derek

[Derek Keats]

Yea, me again....

http://chisimba.com is now running on my much faster shared server, and is upgraded to the latest version of Chisimba. 

It is considerably faster. The server has SSD instead of spinning disks, so disk IO is wickedly fast.

If anyone notices any problems there, please let me know.

I will keep  it running for another year since I am committed to run that server due to other projects.

Note that the DNS change may not have propagated everywhere yet as I only made the change half an hour ago. I am about to kill the old server, so if you get a not found error, wait or refresh. 

regards

derek

[Frank Tilugulilwa]

Great!

--
 
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "chisimba-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to chisimba-dev...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.