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.