Interview - John Cox of Xaraya

John Cox is a member of the Project Management Committee for Xaraya, an advanced content management system currently being developed from members of the old PostNuke team. Recently, I asked him a number of questions about his role, and the Xaraya system.

Firstly, John, can you tell us a little about yourself, and your involvement with the Xaraya development team?

The Xaraya organization is based on the Apache model for open source development. I am one of the four on the Xaraya Project Management Committee. I mainly oversee the release timelines, and do my best to communicate the project’s objectives within the development team, and the community at large.

Marcel van der Boom and Paul Rosania are another part of Xaraya’s PMC. They look at the design and underlying architecture issues of the project. Gregor Rothfuss rounds out the PMC team by overseeing the administration areas, and general research and development.

The PMC is a very small part of what makes us go, though. The team work and camaraderie is the strength of our development, as each one of us chips in with the glamour projects as well as the mundane tasks. We each play a part in the project with support, communication, marketing, design, development, steering, and documentation.

In PostNuke, we played around with role based management and development, but learned that it just created new layers of complexity which gained us very little in the grand scheme of things.

Xaraya is an advanced site management system much like the PostNuke system. What advantages and features does it have over the other systems currently available?

While the comparisons are inevitable, I believe that there are more contrasts that can be made from Nuke-style portal systems to Xaraya.

*Nukes (and there are too many to list, to be honest), gain their popularity from a somewhat simple design which allows the community to plug in to the module system and add to the functionality.

There is a fundamental flaw with the current systems, however, in that in order to extend the functionality, you have to have some knowledge of PHP. The more extensible you want to get, the more grief that you cause yourself at the time of upgrades in that you’ve probably created a rough dependency, or -- worse yet -- changed a core file that will be overwritten. The results of this could be anything from causing quite a bit of frustration, to inflicting downright agony.

Xaraya is different in this respect.

We wanted to make the system more extensible for the average user, and give more power to the module and theme developers out there. We’ve done this in many ways.

Primarily, for the Webmaster, we have built a system that allows you to create new publication types in a matter of minutes. This alleviates the need to wait for the whims of someone with similar needs if you have no PHP knowledge.

For the developer, we have created a very easy to use API, which after a little study makes the development of modules extremely easy and extremely fast. In addition, Frank Besler and Marco have created the events system, which allows the module developer to plug directly into core events so there is no need to change files which will be overwritten on an upgrade.

Finally, we’ve given designers the power they need to create a look and feel that’s not dependant on hard coded design techniques from within the modules, as all output is a template, and can be overridden from theme to theme.

Another advantage over the *Nukes is our privilege and role based system designed by Marc Lutolf. It is easy to use, and also very flexible, which gives us quite a bit of an edge over the *Nuke systems at this point. Marc redesigned the group/user system from the ground up with an approach that kept the flexibility from our PostNuke days, but entails a much easier approach and is much less intimidating for the novice user.