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Two things come to mind 1. Tinfoil hat time! "Pisshorse" make money off of hosting their own software. So they are financially incentivized to make it as diffi
by plaguuuuuu 11y ago
Two things come to mind
1. Tinfoil hat time! "Pisshorse" make money off of hosting their own software. So they are financially incentivized to make it as difficult as possible to install yourself, but at the same time they get to go "woooo, open source" as much as they like.
I'm convinced Oracle did the same sort of thing by making their DB product impossible for normal people to understand, in order to charge outrageously expensive consulting fees to companies. Or so I hear; I've never used it so I could be wrong.
2. Your users aren't always who you think they are. I learned this one switching from back-end/n-tier work over to front-end CMS based web dev. Yes, the users are the people browsing the website, but the users are also the people trying to use the damn CMS, so the website UX and design extends to those people as well.
Meaning, instead of forcing your hapless marketers to use some crazy admin panel with thousands of options and checkboxes, or even try and edit XML configuration (I've actually seen this), any time one extends the functionality of a CMS, creating some custom front-end UI to control it is a basic necessity.
In the same vein, any sort of software (and hardware! printers, tools, cars, whatever) has to consider the installation and maintenance of itself as a UX/design concern and the fact that it has multiple domains of users.
- wpietri 11y agoRegarding tinfoil hats, I don't even think it requires thoughtful greed on the part of Discourse and Oracle. Making something really simple to use takes a great deal of work. It's not that they have chosen to make a simple product complicated; they only have to fail to make a complex product simple.
- eevee 11y agoI observe that they'll happily charge you $99 to install it on your machine for you.
- riking 11y agoNope, that's on a 64-bit Digital Ocean machine that we provision for you. The only secret sauce in the $99 install is the Mandrill reseller code.
- codinghorror 11y agoWell, it is possible to install Discourse in 30 minutes: http://blog.discourse.org/2014/04/install-discourse-in-under-30-minutes/ http://blog.discourse.org/2014/04/install-discourse-in-under... This does require Docker, though, which means 64-bit and a modern Kernel. It's absolutely true that Rails is a very tough stack to install (and let me put my tinfoil hat on: do you think 37signals nee basecamp was ever incentivized to make it easy for people to install Rails apps?), but it needs to be competitive with PHP in the long term if we want things to change. Docker was the only sane way we saw to move forward and support the community with our small (currently 7 person) team. We're all-in on Docker, all our internal hosting uses Docker, and it's the only officially supported install method for Discourse. So never let it be said that we don't eat our own dogfood. Because we do, and it's goddamn delicious.