The decision to shut down the Enano project
June 20, 2016
Hey. I'm Dan. I wrote Enano.
It started out as a small initiative I had in high school to make
a CMS that didn't suck. I wanted it to be themeable - to the
point where you could have no chrome on it at all - and present
very well, but without feeling massive (PHP-NUKE), being super
complicated to learn and maintain (Drupal), or full of security
flaws (Wordpress). It was also a chance for 15-year-old me to
learn how to govern an open source project and build a viable
product from the ground up.
In all honesty, I succeeded. Enano still has what is possibly the
best ACL system in any CMS today, still sticks to its original
goals, and still doesn't feel arcane to use.
In addition, Enano is how I learned how to be a coder. I learned
about best practices, revision control, patches, installation,
user experience, database engineering, optimization, licensing,
graphics design, release engineering, and a whole host of other
topics. Enano made me well-rounded enough to handle a lot of
different roles at least at a basic level, and was therefore a
major contributor to my personal success.
So, even though the project is more or less dead, I don't regret
developing it at all, and would go back and do it all over again
if I had the time and need for it.
But, a lot as changed since then:
- My own needs:
- My personal website
was retooled a couple of years ago to just write
everything in markdown, with HTML for the front
page. It's just simpler.
- If I want to lock down an entire site, I just throw
it behind WebAuth or some other domain level login
scheme.
- My own projects (which mostly don't involve
computers or coding anymore) don't need websites.
- My personal life:
- My full time job does not leave me with enough time
or energy to work on a project as big as Enano. Plus
I don't want to come home from coding all day and
write more code.
- I'm moving in a direction more along the lines of
systems engineering and network/system security, and
away from coding.
- The industry at large:
- The quality of projects such as Wordpress and
MediaWiki has improved considerably
- Some of Enano's clever under-the-hood features, such
as on-demand Javascript loading, no longer work in
modern browsers
- PHP has dramatically improved as a language, and
while Enano's codebase was once considered a good
(or at least not terrible) design, I can't help but
cringe when I look at some of its code now.
- The prevailing text formatting language has changed
from MediaWiki-style formatting to Markdown.
I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to the many individuals who
contributed to the Enano project over the years:
- Neal Gompa - for your loyal commitment to the project and to
me as a friend, your detailed test plans and processes, your
evangelism efforts and for being the second set of eyes on
almost every commit.
- Vadim Peretokin - for your plugin development, insightful
feedback and willingness to be an early adopter.
- Adriano Pereira - for being our first translator and the
Portuguese translation
- The fine folks at
Network Redux.
I've never had web hosting more worry-free than theirs, and
they have hosted the Enano project for nearly a decade now.
– Dan Fuhry