2.3.3: A fairy tale - from rags to ? 
Akamu's side of the story - Dragonfly CMS A long, long time ago.....
In a place far far away....
Waaaaaaaay...... Back....
I was working on a site that had a photo gallery (slooze) to which I added
a bulletin board (phpbb) I wanted to integrate the two member logins and was searching
the web for solutions... I found coppermine and PHP-Nuke.
It was my first experience with opensource and I fell right in.... helping
users on the forums who had less experience than me, and getting help from users
that had more. It was a very interesting time because on coppermine forums...
Grégory Demar the creator of coppermine had in the past been very active
on the forums and now was nowhere to be found. There were moderators like GauGau
and tarique that helped a lot but the administration was gone... imagine that...
then the contract ran out on the domain and the site went down. The moderators
and regulars pulled together and created a new site on sourceforge. The project
moved on slightly uncertainly because the copyright holder was missing but forward
because it was opensource, we started bug fixing and creating new features preparing
for a new release
After several months we were almost ready for release when someone finally
heard from Grégory, he was in China with a new wife and had no plans
to return to his old life as an opensource programmer and gave us his blessing.
Coppermine was now a healthy project and continues to thrive at sourceforge.
But back to PHP-Nuke meanwhile the site for the
port went down and there was no groundswell of developer support as there was
in the standalone version. Well to me the port to PHP-Nuke was not much different
than the standalone that I had been working on so I started porting all the new features
and fixes into the PHP-Nuke version of coppermine... After a while I got
stuck on a few thing and realized that coppermine is the most complicated modules
for PHP-Nuke and I better get help. I posted on several sites as well as sourceforge
of my need.
Well this guy from the Netherlands emailed me wishing to help, I emailed him
back and said if he could fix the code in the filmstrip I was having trouble
with I would have him join me. You see, I wanted to see how he coded to make
sure we were compatible for the job. After a couple days he mailed back the
code and it was clear concise and worked, so I welcomed him aboard that was
the start of djmaze and I's relationship.
We created a port of coppermine that worked great on his PHP-Nuke 6.5 and my
PHP-Nuke 6.8 (two of the best releases in PHP-Nuke's history). While working
on the port to integrate it with the nuke we found many bugs and inconsistencies
with PHP-Nuke code and we were always bitching about one thing or another fixing
this or that, the worst part was having to help our user bug fix their nukes
just so x feature would work. In the meantime before our release PHP-Nuke had
introduced new bugs that caused our coppermine release not to work properly.
We emailed the solution to the developer asking that he fix it in future releases.
We did not hear back from him. We decided that we wanted to release our own
bugfixed version and emailed FB again letting him know we were willing to help
him, but if not, we were going to release this other version. We did not hear
back from him. We then emailed him to let him know we were moving the copyright
to a credits page and that he would continue to receive credit in this fashion.
We did not hear back from him. phpnuke 6.5 CPG was born. and a year and half late it was a Dragonfly emerging from a cocoon!
...and they lived happily ever after...THE END
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A fairy tale - from rags to ?