JACKED Manager Knows What's Up

posted by pope on August 11, 2008 at 12:13 pm

People keep asking me, why does my blog run on some totally unheard of platform that is apparently lacking in features, has no social networking capabilities whatsoever, and also seems to be old and unsupported, called JACKED Manager? There's a very simple answer. JACKED is mine. I made it from scratch. Now, maybe that qualifies it to be the content manager of choice for me and all my projects, but realistically, that is a pretty terrible reason for anyone else to be using JACKED on their own, in the face of alternatives like WordPress and Drupal, projects which are unbelievably feature-rich and have ravenous and deep user and developer communities.

And this also makes me a bad salesman. I'm sitting on my hand-coded CMS explaining to the world its faults and why other products in direct competition with my own are better choices for prospective users. So I'll turn it around a little. Why, despite all I've just said, should someone use JACKED Manager? Because JACKED has a very deep and uncompromising set of beliefs.

JACKED is not running for president, no matter how much this might sound like a pitch for a candidate. JACKED is based on three things: php, MySQL, and the belief that everyone should be able to make and maintain their own websites, without being an expert web developer. Oh, and the first major release will include some actual JavaScript too.

From the first time the people behind the ARPANET realized what they were actually beginning, they intended it to be open. The web grew out of that experiment to become the dominant, global force that it is today, on those open ideals. Today, open brings the idea of the Open Source Initiative, the Free Software Foundation, and, of course, the champion of such ideals, Richard Stallman. That is, you think of these things unless you aren't a Computer Scientist. In which case, open software typically brings to mind, a free version of Office or e-hippies.

Either way, open means something more, that often gets forgotten. Open means accessible to everyone. And the web today is terrible at meeting that definition. We're making progress lately in terms of making the web content accessible for everyone, but we're all still skipping over a key point. Creating content on the web is NOT accessible at all. How can I say that, while I'm sitting here, churning out content into the Big Truck (internet) all day long, every day? I've spent countless hours of my own time, learning markup languages, server and client scripting languages, techniques for coding, concepts behind their use and how they work, and so much more, just to get to the point where I can create websites whenever and about whatever I want. Someone like my 61 year-old dad, has spent no time learning web programming, wouldn't even know where to start to make a simple, static about me page.

The learning curve for creating your own web content is so obscene that most people can barely change their MySpace layouts, and even then they turn to pre-made templates created by CSS/HTML "experts". That doesn't exactly turn a lot of people on to the prospect of making their own website.

For example, let's take updating your content manager installation when a new version is released. One site running JACKED 1.0, and one site running WordPress 2.5.1. To upgrade to WordPress version 2.6, you are directed to download a .zip from their website, then extract its contents into the proper folder on your webserver, while preserving certain configuration files, and make sure your database will be compatible (if it's not, you'll have to fix that, too). To upgrade to JACKED 1.x, or 2.x, or x.x, simply log into your JACKED admin home, open the Updater by clicking the appropriate link, and let it do its job. Assuming you don't even know how to put files on a webserver, which upgrade method would you prefer? When upgrading a modern system of any kind, that system knows exactly what it is, where its parts are, how they work, and what's inside them. Why should the user have to? Let it take care of its own dirty work.

Now, obviously there are some shortcomings to this thought process, such as initial installation. At this point there is no realistic simple installation process that doesn't involve having to set up a MySQL database with proper users and permissions, and things of that nature. Yet. But that is just initially. Once JACKED is installed and working on your server, there should never again be any need to get your hands dirty with webserver settings and databases and all that technical crap.

Making the web truly open and accessible to everyone in the world is a goal that no one software package could ever achieve, but it's a start. JACKED sets the bar higher. And if more of us would shoot for that kind of goal, then we really can start to change the web forever.

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tags: JACKED, projects, personal, Open Web, all tags
5 comments:  view  |  leave one

LOL!
posted by Steven on December 15, 2008 at 1:55 am
Although I did just figure out how to dump another query in there, but MySQL throws back an error if the query does anything other than return a single row.
posted by pope on August 21, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Dan,
the version running this site IS pretty dumbed down (first version ever) and there are a lot of bugs. A great one is how it shows the "posted by" date on the newscomment page as a timestamp. But, I don't see how the vulnerability works. Everything is bluntly escaped, so the worst thing that can happen seems to be causing an error message.
posted by pope on August 21, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Also, you appear to have SQL injection vulnerabilities.

For instance: http://nickpettazzoni.com/newscomment.php?id=;DELETE%20FROM%20yougetthepoint

Just sayin' :)
posted by Dan on August 15, 2008 at 3:08 am
Since you're talking about your CMS, I figured I should let you know that you have a bug in what generates your RSS feed. Single quotes come out escaped in the title of posts. Maybe one too many addslashes() somewhere. :)
posted by Dan on August 15, 2008 at 3:05 am

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