I’m busting ass setting up a website using the popular, if yet a work in progress, CMS postNuke, and oog, I’m experiencing the downside of opensource collaboratively developed projects.

Which is not to say that so far I haven’t been pleased by the capabilities and featureset of the application. It is to say I’ve been quite frustrated by poor documentation, aggravating, developer-centric assumptions about how users and administrators will interact with the system once it’s in place, and partially-implemented functionality.

I opted for postnuke over phpnuke based on security concerns (phpnuke explicitly requires “register_globals” to be on in php, which is deprecated in the current release of php), and I’m, frankly, wondering if I made the right choice.

I’ll continue with the implementation under postnuke for now, but the project is apparently in extreme disarray following the motorcycle-accident death of its’ lead developer this summer. A variety of long-term developers appear to have forked from postnuke to a new project, as yet in gestation, and the rump team have released a version of postnuke with many housekeeping issues, while at the same time updating the postnuke website in such a way that older user discussions and documentation is effectively inaccessible.

Shhh… no-one tell Microsoft marketing about this.