What’s the story with sxore?
Written on July 6, 2006 by Conor O'Neill
I installed the sxore comments management system on this site back on April 4th. I had a few issues getting it up and running but one of their developers was very helpful in getting it going. At the time I noted a few limitations and behaviours I wasn’t very happy with. Some are core features of the system which will not change and but others could change and I was reassured that they would.
Since then I have stuck with it in the expectation of the changes happening but I am starting to get very concerned about progress and direction for sxore.
This is a system designed for blogs but the last time they updated their own blog was on April 17th. This is also the last time the software was updated. The idea of release early, release often must not be in use there. They really need to change their behaviour as they have now become totally opaque and I don’t even know if they are still developing.
Compare this to the ClaimID guys who post several times a week and are constantly releasing small useful upgrades. Myself and a bunch of others complained when their recent hCard improvement was totallly US centric and they changed it in less than a day!
I will list my issues with the sxore system at the end but the single biggest concern I have is with the fact that my comment data is in their silo and I have no way of getting it out. I purposely use the word “silo” since that is one of Dick Hardt’s favourite phrases when criticising others. The reason I stuck with sxore was that I was informed that they would provide [a] a full RSS feed of all posts/comments on the blog and [b] a sxore to Wordpress export/import.
My sense is that sxore has got minimal traction in the blogosphere. Apart from this blog I have only ever seen it on three others - two of which are related to the sxore business itself. I am not surprised by this as the lack of any news or obvious progress on the product means that no-one is talking about it and therefore no-one is trying it out.
As a result, my confidence in sxore is now seriously reduced and if it was possible, I would revert to standard Wordpress comments. The existance of an export/import system would, in a strange way, restore confidence and probably cause me to stick with sxore as long as some timelines and roadmaps were given for the other fixes.
Or maybe not. I have just realised that the management interface is completely broken for all recent comments and I cannot access them. I reported the initial problem on June 9th and it was confirmed as a bug. Here we are a month later and no change. I think I want out. How do I get my comment data back into Wordpress?
This is the list of issues/problems as I currently see them. Many of them are surely fixable with minimal development effort.
[1] They host your comments. This is a core feature and will not change. Requires huge trust by the user
[2] There is no way of getting that data out of sxore if you decide to leave
[3] There is no “Subscribe to comments” facility
[4] Whitelisting only seems to work for sxore employees?
[5] I have to approve my own comments!
[6] There is no “Recent Comments” facility
[7] I cannot edit commenters comments. This is a core feature related to information ownership. But it is a serious pain if something in a user comment causes formatting issues on the blog.
[8] Multiple personas have not been implemented in sxip yet. So I have two sxip accounts and two sxore accounts
[9] There are no permalinks to comments so you cannot refer to an individual comment by URL.
[10] It adds “Post a comment†buttons to Pages which have been identified as “non commentable†in Wordpress
[11] The count of comments and trackbacks on the management interface are wrong due to some incompatibility with the Feedburner feed that I use.
BTW, I have switched Feedburner feed over to ATOM 1.0 instead of RSS. That explains why you saw a lot of my posts re-listed as new. Please let me know if it causes any issues.
Technorati Tags: sxore, sxip, Dick Hardt, Identity, RSS, ATOM
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Hey Conor
Apprecieate you stepping up and installing sxore. Like all Beta software, sxore is not perfect, and we have learned tons of things at Sxip about identity and the blogosphere.
The ’silo’ aspects of sxore are all things we at Sxip would like to address. We are looking at how we can completely rearchitect sxore so that the comment management is completely dectralized. As you can imagine, this is a significant overhaul.
Note that your comments are not locked into sxore, they are all available as feeds that the Wordpress plugin grabs, stores localy, and displays.
I totally understand that sxore is beta Dick and that is why I have patiently waited for fixes rather than giving up.
But the problem is more that sxore seems to have just stopped communicating with the outside world. No software releases (even simple patches) in three months, no blog posts in three months and no messages on the dev mailing list in three months. It simply does not look like an active project to someone looking in.
If you are re-architecting it, I’d love to hear about it (and I’m sure many others would too). What’s the roadmap? What are the timelines? Are there going to be any fixes on the current branch in the meantime?
As for the feeds, I had a quick look at the code but I’m no PHP coder. What are the URLs for the comment feeds for my site? I don’t see them anywhere in the sxore control panel. Not only do I want those feeds to get at the data itself but it would also allow others to subscribe to a comment feed (which is the number one criticism I have received about sxore from others). I looked at the "follow" feature but it is missing recent comments.
The reason I installed sxore in the first place was that I totally buy in to where you are going with sxip and sxore but unless the delivery is there too, the community energy may leak away.
All good points Conner.
fwiw: the prime developer on sxore has had some health issues that have impacted our ability to deliver.
I’m glad you let me know that Dick. If it is Weston that has been unwell, please pass on my best wishes. He really went far beyond the call of duty to help me figure out my Wordpress theme issues so I could get sxore up and running in the first place.
Hope you get the Sxore issues sorted , might give me the incentive to try again (it stopped taking my login details , and in the mean-time the Askimet plugin with Wordpress 2.0 did a good enough job of stopping the spam).
Like the new theme. Seems vaugely familiar
Oops, same theme as yourself? I never see blog themes as I read everything via RSS. Tried about 6 last week and it gave the least hassle of them all. Simple seems to be the best approach.
Conor,
It’s the same as my *old* theme , the one that I used until about 3 weeks ago. I since switched to Canvas as a wordpress theme.
Advantage is (i) an Ajax drag a drop Theme / Colour editor and (ii) Where I write custom php code, it is in small blocks that I can just drop into the theme as per (i). Worth taking a look at.
Paul
I’ll have a look. My only issue with some of the Ajaxy ones is that they are more brittle with plug-ins.
So far (fingers crossed) Canvas has been robust enough. The Ajax is in the Theme editor, not the CSS/ HTML that the reader sees. Regarding Plugins , I have an array of small , large (e.g. Structured blogging , which almost rewrites wordpress) and self written (e.g. the links at the top of the page). It was easy enough to take these out of the previous theme (several modifications to one large file) and put them into small , self contained blocks.
Paul , Technology in plain English
Sounds excellent.
Test
Test2
Testing new sxore logon options