Open Source CMS Award Final Five: e107

History

jalist, the creator of e107 talks us through the history of the content management system:

I've never kept a journal or list of dates corresponding to e107's evolution, so all of the following is recounted from memory and is probably full of chronological errors

In late 1998, I coded and opened a website called Litestep2000 related to the Windows shell replacement Litestep. The site got fairly popular and a few months later became ls2k.org, when it moved to a php enabled server and I started my first tentative steps into scripting. After about 18 months of coding and maintaining this site, I was offered the chance by the then main admin c0mrade to take over the main Litestep theme site, litestep.net. I coded the site and I'm proud to say it continued to grow in popularity while I, DeViLbOi and jugg were at the helm.

Due to running such a busy site, I was always getting requests for site code, or portions of the code we used on litestep.net from other members of the Litestep community, but due to time restraints and real life, I was very rarely able to help, so I set about taking some of the code from litestep.net and ls2k.org and turning it into a more modular and distributable codebase.

Over the space of a couple of months, websites (mainly Litestep and shell related) started popping up, and feature requests started coming in, so I decided to get a domain and give the code a name. I settled on e107 as it was turning out to be my seventh main project, and I purchased e107.org and set up a small e107 powered website there.

The site opened in July 2002, and e107 was a couple of months old at that stage, and at version 2.1. I continued to code and release revisions until 5.4 when I decided on a version numbering change, and the next version released was 0.6, which saw a major revamp of the code. At this time new versions and revisions were coming out on almost a daily basis, imagine that :)

I was still maintaining the e107 codebase alone, but accepting contributions from users, notably McFly, Lolo_Irie, Cameron and a few others, but with version 0.612 I decided to ask a few of these contributors to join a newly formed development team, consisting of McFly, chavo, Cameron and Lolo_Irie, and myself. I was proud that these people accepting places as not only are they good coders, they were all good people as well, and still are :)

A couple of versions later, I decided to take a step back from the development side of e107, as maintaining what had in a short period become a quite popular system had taken it's toll on my real life, and I was not only tired but having to deal with the regular attacks on e107.org. The development team have continued to release new versions (at the time of writing e107 stands at v0.617) and make improvements and refine the e107 core.

I started tentative development of a new system in March 2004, codenamed nostromo. This isn't intended to replace e107 and will probably never see the light of day due to real life issues (again pfft). This code, or at least the site it produces, can be seen at my personal site jalist.com.

So there we have it, e107, due mainly to the work of the dev team, plugin coders and the people who selflessly and mostly thanklessly man the forums with support for less experienced users, has come a very long way in it's first two years of life, and hopefully will continue to grow for the next two years and beyond - my sincerest thanks to everyone that has contributed in even the smallest way.