Request for assistance/advice: TikiWiki CMS/Groupware will have to drop PostgreSQL support soon unless a maintainer steps up

From: Marc Laporte <marclaporte(at)tikiwiki(dot)org>
To: pgsql-advocacy(at)postgresql(dot)org
Cc: Tikiwiki developers <tikiwiki-devel(at)lists(dot)sourceforge(dot)net>
Subject: Request for assistance/advice: TikiWiki CMS/Groupware will have to drop PostgreSQL support soon unless a maintainer steps up
Date: 2009-06-08 04:29:53
Message-ID: 8ae99f050906072129mdfc840bk423538844d23eaba@mail.gmail.com
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Hello to the PostgreSQL community!

I asked someone in the PostgreSQL community and he wrote: "There have
been past conversations on the advocacy's mailing list discussing the
lack of implementation of web based front-ends using PostgreSQL. You
could post a request for help on the advocacy mail list."

This is a request for assistance/advice. Please point me to the right
people/place if this is the wrong place.

I am a project admin for TikiWiki CMS/Groupware.

"TikiWiki CMS/Groupware is a full-featured, web-based, multilingual,
tightly integrated, all-in-one Wiki+CMS+Groupware, Free Source
Software (GNU/LGPL), using PHP, ADOdb, Zend Framework, jQuery and
Smarty. It is actively developed by a very large international
community and is translated in over 35 languages. TikiWiki can be used
to create all sorts of Web applications, sites, portals, knowledge
base, intranets, and extranets."

A few stats to give an idea of the scope of the project
* Over 1 million lines of code.
* 220+ developers directly committing to the core, with countless
other people helping with support, documentation, testing, etc.
* 1000+ pages of documentation.
* A new code commit every 2 hours (average of last 5 years)
* 16 000+ registered users on tikiwiki.org
* 700 000+ downloads

Also:
http://info.tikiwiki.org/Fact+Sheet
http://support.mozilla.com/ (10 million page views per week) and
wiki.kde.org are powered by Tiki

Tiki uses a database abstraction layer so it can be used with many
databases (PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, SQLite) in addition to MYSQL.
However, support for anything but MySQL has become more & more
problematic. It's not strictly a chicken & egg problem because Tiki
once worked with non-MYSQL. However, without maintainers, it was lost
over time.

So we have come to a difficult decision. In about 50 days, database
independence will be dropped in Tiki unless a maintainer steps up. So
Tiki will become officially MySQL-only.

Why?
--------
We would love to support many databases, especially PostgreSQL because
it's an open source & community-managed project like Tiki. There are
many reasons why we would want database independence and it's no use
listing them here because it's not that we don't want. It's that we
don't have the resources to do so. Tiki is a huge application and we
would need active devs that use/maintain Tikis on other databases.

However, since we have no maintainer, we have been for a long time now
in a "Worst of both worlds" situation.
*Extra code to maintain
*Bugs that never get fixed
*People that are disappointed (feeling it's "false-advertising")
*Not taking full advantage of MySQL advanced features

More information here:
http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Database+independence

This is very disappointing to me because I have always wanted Tiki to
be as universal as possible. So I don't want to give up on this goal
without a fight. Which is why I am writing to you today.

I look forward to any advice or help you may provide.

Best regards,

--
Marc Laporte

http://MarcLaporte.com
http://TikiWiki.org/MarcLaporte

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