Hippo

Time for my apologies. Maybe it was a little bit to early to announce Hippo CMS as the new Cocoon based open source CMS back in september 2004...

During the CMS shootout session on that particular day, I was on stage, firing away at both Steven Noels' Daisy and Michi Wechner's Lenya. I can remember I felt damn lucky that Steven and I flipped the coin and I Iost - which meant, Steven had to go first. It bought me some extra time to come up with the right arguments of why one should use Hippo CMS and not Daisy :-). Michi was not there - he was unable to attend the conference, but he sent us a very interesting movie which we played and laughed about. Anyway - it was fun to do.. :)
That day, I told the audience that we would have the Hippo CMS codebase publically available by december... Yep - 2004. Apparantly, it took us another year..

So, what have we been up to for the last one and a half years then?

We...

• removed all constraints on proprietary libraries and non-Apache license compliant code


• redesigned all of the icons and graphic elements (allowing us to make them available under the Apache license)


• wrote lots of documentation


• set up samples


• finalized the development and deployment process


• set up a public SVN, Wiki, mailinglist, and all the other community things one is expected to do when opening up


• organized the Cocoon GetTogether 2005


• .... while adding lots of new functionalities in the process

The result can be found at www.hippocms.org. Downloading the distributions, firing them up and playing around with the result should be fairly easy to do for anyone who has access to a command prompt ;).

Now, about those apologies you're reading this post for; let's say I'm just very very happy that we've finally made it to opening up Hippo CMS. I'm sorry if I've let you all wait for sooooo long. But it was really good to have so many people pressing us to get the job done. Thanks, guys - it really pushed us to take that final leap. And as Andrew pointed out, it's not easy to open up a development process. But hey, we didn't expect it to be so.. Although we were suddenly hit by the fact that we were depending too heavily on external proprietary components, and we've just recently managed to get rid of them (note to self: make sure you've build in enough abstraction ;-) ).

Also - and this may sound a bit silly but I guess the ones closest to me know it's true - Hippo CMS has never been closed. We're not just moving our code from proprietary to open source - our source code has always been available to customers, and to those interested in working with it. We've encouraged external (Cocoon) developers to criticize our code and share thoughts on the architecture. Over the last year, this has evolved into the current lively Hippo CMS community, with a reasonably busy mailinglist and massive amounts of SVN commits every day. Thanks to those that did share their thoughts, checked our code and helped develop the solid CMS it has turned out to be.

And now, finally, I can publically announce the fact that the Hippo CMS codebase indeed is available online. :-)

We feel and breathe open source, in good Apache sense. The clouds have cleared, the sun is shining and we're ready for some action.

So - get started and have fun!

Regards,

-- Arjé Cahn