I think part 1 got deleted.  Either that or I don’t remember where it is.  I suppose a third possibility is that I never typed it in the first place, but I’m pretty sure I did.  Anyway, if you don’t consider yourself technically inclined or “internet-savvy”, you may want to skip this post.  It’ll probably seem irrelevant.

The xOOPS team issued a release detailing the roadmap for their next major revision.  Pretty boring stuff, filled with lots of corporate “can-do” fluff (disturbingly disappointing, since they’re not a corporation or even a non-profit entity).  The part that caught my eye was this:

The development and the release of XOOPS 2.2 did not happen as expected.  All that just occurred will be rich of lessons: to face such problems is the best thing one can hope to allow him to exceed oneself.  Many things were learned to avoid reproducing some mistakes.  In order to answer waitings of certain people having performed an unfortunate update of their site, a script making it possible to [downgrade] an installation of XOOPS 2.2.x into XOOPS 2.0.13 will be also available.

They also go on to detail the specific failures of their 2.2 release, which, as you may recall, was the reason floor-9.com got wiped out earlier this month.  Their 2.2 release was by all ways and means a cataclysmic failure that caused a lot of damage to a lot of websites.  But since xOOPS websites are rarely anything but content-driven, the gross incompetence of the xOOPS team also wiped out weeks, months, in some cases even years of community collaboration.  In my case it only wiped out my logins and comments; it could’ve been a lot worse (imagine if I had been running xOOPS from day one).

I’m terrified to run another upgrade to xOOPS.  I know my way around SQL, but that doesn’t mean I want to sit here rebuilding the database “just in case” the xOOPS devteam pulls another “oopsie” and mis-labels an upgrade.  My next upgrade will be moving out of xOOPS and into something like Drupal or one of the *nuke CMSes.  Which is a shame, because xOOPS has a lot of potential.  It’s easily the most well-rounded, complete CMS I’ve ever seen; unfortunately, it’s fairly complex and is riddled with duct-tape code and piss-poor programming (come on, can’t we figure out magicquotes by now?).

Lastly, as my friend Mak references in his blog, I did *not* encourage him to use xOOPS.  I pointed him to Nucleus.  So there.