keith’s new self

Hey - wanna see some truly heinous code - check out the simpleboard component for the open-source CMS Mambo. It is a case study in horrid, nonsensical spaghetti code. The UI sucks too. And guess what? It’s the only truly integrated bulletin board for Mambo. I’ve been doing contract work for about a year implementing custom Mambo solutions, and much of it has been a horror show. Now, Mambo itself ain’t that bad. For an open source CMS in PHP (most totally suck), it has some nice features, and is fairly well written. The problem is the people who write the components… dear lord. It’s the software equivalent Vogon poetry.

Over the last while I’ve had to work with some the worst code I’ve ever seen - an unholy trinity made up of simpleboard, docman, and phpshop. All of which I naively decided to use in solutions for customers and ended up paying for fixing the many bugs, cutting out the backwards/superfluous/ugly UI ‘features’, and reading through pages of muck trying to extend them in simple ways.

I appreciate that people are making an effort to create free software, but I guess I just wish that the bar was higher in terms of quality. Is there a well written, nice looking (fairly minimal), open source CMS / Portal project, with equally good plugins/components, to be found anywhere?

If I had the time I would write some decent, simple Mambo components to replace the really bad ones, maybe using Cake as a framework. The world would be a better place for it. Anyway, glad to be moving on.
tags: badcode, code, mambo, php

posted: 1:11 am