Zikula Blog

The holy grail of content publishing - that's exactly what Pagesetter means to so many people. A little known fact is this multipurpose, do it all module was written on the train, by Jorn - to and from his way to work! Pagesetter is basically a database system, you can configure the schema and generate forms to display that data. With Pagesetter alone, you can do most tasks all with the same module. It's no wonder that that there was great disappointment when Jorn announced he would orphan all his modules due to the birth of his first child.

Pagesetter is undoubtedly the hero of all modules - but, possibly due to it's complexity, was never really adopted properly, and has definitely gone to the place where dead modules go. Almost in denial, no-one really wants to admit this sad fact, but accept we must.

So how exactly do we fill the void?

The Zikula Foundation teamed up with several interested parties several months ago to plan and raise funds for commercial development of the PageMaster project which was originally started by Marco Kundert a few years ago as a pure Zikula replacement to Pagesetter but was never quite finished. The goal is to provide a one stop shop for all content publishing needs: not only to match what Pagesetter can do, but to far exceed it - especially in usability features. These features will be rolled out over five milestones. The first milestone was set to make the module usable in Zikula 1.2.x and close all the pressing bugs - some 72 issues were closed and the result PagePaster 0.4.0.

Work has begun on the next already on the next milestone 0.9.0 will add relations to PageMaster and other features to meet and exceed the featureset of Pagesetter. This will hopefully be nicely timed to co-incide with Zikula 1.3.0 because, this module from 0.9.0 requires a minimum version of Zikula Core 1.3.0. From there, more featuresets, usability and UI making use of the latest will be the focus of the remaining milestones - which will no-doubt make PageMaster the new hero on the block!

This is the first commercially backed project of the Zikula Foundation with sponsors. We haven't raised all the money required to complete the milestones and after the 0.9.0 showcase release, we will start more fundraising efforts because we believe PageMaster not only fills the void, but infact can way exceed it's already excellent source of inspiration, Pagesetter.