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How well does YACS scale? Future of YACS?

Torres, A. -- on Mar. 17 2006

I've used YACS a bit and it's great.

I want to produce a professional quality community portal and would like to use YACS but don't know how well it scales. Also, I'm just wondering about the future of YACS - will it remain open source? Will there be 3rd party support in the future for people who might need it?

Bernard - are you going to create do professional support services, hosting, and website design in the futre on YACS - that would be great.

Wishlist: Tree navigation of site and column option templates per page with easy add-on of module/service on each page (see Docebo CMS for an example).

Bernard from nearby-an-airport Associate, 7054 posts	on Mar. 17 2006 " how well it scales " To say the truth, YACS has not been designed to compete with very large portals However it has successfully evolved over time to further support fast growing sites. Not the biggest site made out of YACS, but a significant one: http://www.zaniroli.com/yacs/control/index.php The current design can afford throusands of articles and users with no problem.
Bernard from nearby-an-airport Associate, 7054 posts	on Mar. 17 2006 " the future of YACS - will it remain open source? Will there be 3rd party support in the future for people who might need it? " How did you know that the YACS team had a strategic meeting today on this topic? Had you install a webcam somewhere? The core of YACS will remain open source, with a licensing scheme (LGPL) that allows IT professional to add new scripts, and to resell the whole if they wish. The approach is similar than the one used for OpenOffice vs. StarOffice. Moreover, we have clearly defined today a strategy to involve IT professionals as early as possible. Let us some weeks to shape this value proposition and to introduce this to our market.
Bernard from nearby-an-airport Associate, 7054 posts	on Mar. 17 2006 " professional support services, hosting, and website design in the future on YACS " Yes, developing such services is part of the open source landscape. If the software is free, end users have to pay to get services, including those you mention. professional services - the goal is to make content management with YACS as easy as possible. However, you may need to hire some external contractor to help you during the creation of the web structure, or to add bells and whistles. If one day of an external expert may save two days of your time, the best option is probably to go external, no? hosting fees - YACS has been designed to fully support the Apache/MySQL/PHP (AMP) platform, which is readily available and cheap. Some ASP can host these for free, but if you take care of site performance you would prefer to spend some bucks each year. Moreover, we will look at specialized packaging to ease installation and maintenance on some platforms. design - YACS is fully XHTML and provides advanced support of CSS, and we will trigger a challenge by which talented designers will be incentivised to show the power of these. The vision is that small organizations and companies should be able to find a skin suitable for their need at low cost, while other organizations could select to spend more to get a complex skin.
ATorres617 9 posts	inspired from Bernard on Mar. 17 2006 Well - since I don't have any users yet - this isn't a big deal - but YACS definitely has a good feature set to start with. FYI - Have you seen http://elgg.net/ Have you considered incorporating Shadows or Tecnorati?
ATorres617 9 posts	inspired from Bernard on Mar. 17 2006 Sounds good - I can easily see the opportunity for a modest YACS support contract - especially for a small start-up like the one I'm planning.
Bernard from nearby-an-airport Associate, 7054 posts	on Mar. 18 2006 (see Docebo CMS for an example) This seems to be a very nice piece of software, with a very high level of on-line customization. Thank you for the pointer there. Content in YACS is probably more 'linear' than in Docebo CMS. If you want to add boxes to a section, create a sub-section, and configure it accordingly. Instead of going into details here, I would prefer to let you play with the several YACS features related to content organization, and hope you will provide additional feed-back afterwards. Thank you so much for your interest in YACS.

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