Why does Berkeley think it should be in the business of building its own content management systems anyway?
Thursday, August 27th, 2009Brad Delong asks “Why does Berkeley think it should be in the business of building its own content management systems anyway?“.
His complaint:
May I say that a content management system that–if you have been off dealing with another crisis in the middle of a task–decides when you come back and try to save your work that you are no longer logged in and dumps you to a login page after which it dumps you not on the page you were working on but on the root page, LOSING YOUR WORK!!!1!!
Such a content management system is HELLSPAWN!! Is WROSE THAN HILTER!1!!!1!…
He is complaining about bspace, which is based on the open-source
Sakai, a content management system written in Java, and focused on the needs of universities.
I think Delong’s post is a good reminder of how infuriating it can be for users when software fails to behave in the ways users expect. I also suspect this is a good example of an issue that users will regard as a bug, but the programmers will see it simply as a potential future feature that they may or may not add (”Should we catch POST info if a user is not logged in?”).
I should add, WordPress has exactly the same problem. Last week I started writing what I thought would be a short post for this blog, but I got carried away by my theme and wrote a long post. Then I went to get some dinner. I left the browser open, with the post unpublished. I came back after dinner and made some more edits, then hit the publish button – and just like that, my work vanished, because while I was out getting dinner, WordPress logged me out (for some reason I’d assumed that the auto-save feature was also refreshing my session info).
One of the nice things about building my own CMS was that I was free to fix the bugs that bothered me most, and this was a big one for me. I added a feature to my CMS that caught any POST info and showed it on screen, even if the person was logged out. This allowed recovery of the post. I worked on my CMS from 2002-2007 and then abandoned it because I could not keep up with projects like WordPress. Nowadays I force myself to use other people’s open source software, because it is economically rational to do so, but I hate some of the choices they make, and some of the features that they fail to implement.
In the comments, Jacob Davies posts this comment, which I thought was very funny and very on point:
Conversation that has happened more times in my career than I care to mention:
Someone else: “How long of a title shall we allow? 32 characters? 64?”
Me: “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY DO WE NEED TO SET A MAXIMUM LENGTH? IS THIS 1952???”
Someone else: “But what if they put in a really long title and fill up the database?”
Me: “THE VERY NEXT FIELD – THE ‘CONTENTS’ FIELD – IS A FREE-TEXT FIELD WITHOUT A LENGTH CONSTRAINT SO IF THEY WANTED TO FILL THE DATABASE THEY COULD DO IT THERE ANYWAY.”
Someone else: “Won’t it waste space if we allow a variable-length string in the title?”
Me: “OH MY GOD YES A TERRIFYING LOSS OF ABOUT 3 BYTES ON A RECORD THAT IS A MINIMUM OF 1024 BYTES LONG AND OFTEN OVER A MEGABYTE, YOU ARE SO RIGHT.”
Someone else: “Yes but every other system has a length constraint for titles.”
Me: “YES AND I SUPPOSE IF EVERYONE ELSE WAS JUMPING OFF A BRIDGE YOU’D DO IT TOO.”
etc
Computer programmers are subject to some kind of strange mental degeneration in which they rate the potential waste of 0.00001% of the capacity of a modern hard disk as more important than the ability to enter titles longer than 32 characters in length.
