OpenWP – the joomla integrated wordpress component which powers this and many other sites have been officially discontinued. The reason as stated by the developer at joompro solutions is the decision by the Joomla core team to retain it’s GPL license, and their belief that this applies to outside components. Although the wordpress integration is a free software project, the same developer has commercial projects he believes will be harmed by this decision.
With this it also ends the development of the openwiki and opensef projects. Whether these projects will be restored later.
Of course this has a massive downstream impact on sites like mine. The outkafe wiki which is openwiki based will need to move, but that can be delayed a bit. Hopefully this particular component will be forked from the last release because it’s the only proper wiki component for joomla.
As for the blog, I am between two choices, one is to fork openwp myself and continue it. I have however decided against this. My reason is that openwp was never fully compatible with it’s upstream source, the integration was great – but the lack of compatibility meant that sites like mine were always behind the main wordpress tree. Moreover plugins sometimes didn’t work. themes didn’t work at all (though this was because the component aimed to follow joomla templates) – etc. etc.
Since this blog doesn’t use user registration anyway, it is my believe that I can replicate all the capabilities of the component by simply using joomla’s wrapper component – and gain that compatibility which is currently missing. Apart from migrating my own antispam plugins this should be a fairly painless excercise. I will do my best to keep the URL’s the same.
Update: The migration s complete, most stuff came through pretty clean, but it wasn’t perfect. Biggest loss would be that many older comments are not linked to the right posts anymore, luckilly there are very few of those. Things should be good to go with little noticeable difference, even the RSS URL’s should be the same.
