With its announcement of RC1 of Xaraya 1.0.0 this CMS may soon start receiving the respect it deserves. I expect that a lot of people will soon start to take notice of the power and functionality it provides.
I don’t expect to upgrade to RC1 – this site is running on 0.9.13, the last beta release prior to the relese of RC1. It is a fairly big install and I will wait to see if there are further releases prior to version 1.
One of the problems many people have found with Xaraya is the steep learning curve, which I have mentioned in a previous article.
The more I use it the more impressed I am. But I think if I don’t keep playing with it I am going to forget how I did some things. But I understand that the Xaraya team are aware of how confusing some it seems and are working hard to improve the documentation.
One of the complaints I have read is that Xaraya is good for techies but not for normal non-geeks who have a life outside in the sun and fresh air. There is some truth in that but it can be overstated. Any CMS is going to require some tweaking to get it to do what you want.
My first install of Xaraya, on my local server, was hacked beyond redemption. I played with the PHP trying to force Xaraya to bend to my will. It didn’t bend, I broke it, and had to start again. But I eventually found out that all of that was unnecessary. This version I am running now is all Xaraya PHP as it comes out of the box, or down the phone line to be more precise. I could be wrong, but I think this is unusual.
Oops, I told a lie. You do have to change the config.system.php, but those changes are spelled out very clearly in the install.txt file, and those sorts of changes are necessary for any CMS.
Is Xaraya perfect? Not yet. There are a couple of things that I am having trouble with but so far it does almost everything I want flawlessly.