Where is Blaze heading?
Blaze is one of the first CodeIgniter Content Management Systems…
And it’s got a bright future ahead!
I’ve decided to post here the ‘direction’ of Blaze, and where I’m hoping to take this project.
- Firstly, Blaze will always be ‘dynamic’ and flexible, allowing developers to customize and modify everything about it.
- There will always be 3rd party modules for people to download and add extra functionality to their install.
- Blaze templates will allow developers to assign different content to different blocks, from any module.
For example:
On the home page you may want the latest news stories, latest store products and a welcome text…This will be possible by assign different template areas to diffent controller methods.
- Blaze will always be free for personal use, and fairly licensed.
In the next few releases I’ll be pushing to build:
- Simple installer - helping you to get things up and running easily.
- New template system
- Account module for front-end (login system)
I hope this gives you some confidence in Blaze and its future.
Elliot
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I just wanted to give your system a spin, but I got this error-message:
An Error Was Encountered
Error Number: 1146
Table ‘blaze.settings’ doesn’t exist
SELECT * FROM (`settings`) LIMIT 1
Thought I’d let you know.
Hi Elliot .
Can i load page_english.php at the moment ?
Regards
phpwebdev
@flo
It looks like you’re using an earlier database.
You should delete the old blaze db and start again using the new sql script in the zip.
“Blaze will always be free for personal use, and fairly licensed.”
Why not release Blaze under GPL or some flavor of Creative Commons License?
For example: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/
You are free to charge for a commercial use of blaze, it’s your code and your efforts in the end.
But please also consider these points
1) you’re building your product on Codeigniter and its all-time contributors should deserve some respect and appreciation.
2) if Blaze adopt a restrictve licence it will get a reduced amount of contributions (modules, themes, etc) ; Expression Engine clearly shows this.
So i’d suggest you to revise your decision.
ATB, ralf
Hey ralf, regarding licensing…
Blaze is licensed under a creative commons not for profit license, in the future there may be a small charge to use it for commercial purposes, but that charge will go to a fund to pay for hosting, domains, etc…
Alternatively the license may be changed to allow commercial use, ad simply accept donations from anyone who fees like donating.
@elliot
thank you for clarifying,
i think the second option (accept free donations) would be the best choice.
btw, keep up the good work!
I’ve got to say I think the licensing could be an issue for many people, not to mention yourself as well because I would imagine you would also need to provide support.
Charging a fee for commercial use would put it alongside other offerings such as EE itself.
I look at it this way…
I don’t want to be charging my clients extra just so they can change the content of their sites. In 2008 I think that is pretty much expected.
Also if it’s only free for personal use, I could get by with Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla or a whole host of other offerings.
Although I’m new to CI, I can see the community is crying out for a free CMS solution that they can use in their projects and sooner or later someone will make one.
That’s just my opinion though Elliot, it’s still a great project that I can learn from and I wish you success whichever way you decide to go with it.
This is only my opinions and comments, not a judgement call. Your time is obviously valuable and you should be compensated for it.
But, considering the license, as mentioned, with the numerous quality options that are free, Blaze will have to be pretty amazing to have a restrictive pay for commercial license.
I would suggest deciding firmly on the license at least for some time. Using myself as an example, upon reading about Blaze I was very interested in trying it. After reading about the potential commercial license I feel I shouldn’t spend my time on it as I am uncertain as to how the license will affect me in the future.
CodeIgniter has a very liberal license and a commercial license may be a hard sell to the CI clan. Those who are already paying into the EllisLabs products most likely won’t jump ship unless Blaze is phenomenal. So, you’ll probably be looking elsewhere to find your paying customer base.
Options Mark mentioned: Drupal is a fantastic piece of software, Wordpress is still considered the best way to go for a blog and Joomla has a massive fan base. Those are some mighty big shoes to fill.
You might do better with the model Joomla seems to thrive on. Free base with plugins or custom work for pay. Also, if you were to incorporate the CMS or aspects of it into your book in some way, it could generate a lot of interest and build a strong customer base to draw paid work from.
In my opinion, a company interested in the product would be just as likely to pay for your personal attention as they would the product itself.
Either way, good luck with the project. Its always nice to read about new CI programs.
XAMPP WindowsXP
I have dowloaded latest version 0.90 of Blaze. Copy to c:/xampp/htdocs
It can’t find the styles (bad path).
In SeaMonley View->Source code. You can find something like this:
That path does not exist.