« …but they are attempting to secretly kill PHPizabi with the release of Open Orion. »

I can't tell how many times I have been pointed to an article that says Orion is the death of PHPizabi and how many emails I received from people worrying about what would happen to PHPizabi after the release of Orion. Since the day OpenOrion.com was brought up, I noticed people started to be confused about how things are going to happen. So I decided to post a short update to make things clear.


First, what is Open Orion?
oO is a generic web platform. To make it really simple; it’s a platform with which you can build anything. The Open Orion platform is not meant to replace or kill PHPizabi; just consider it a totally new product.


Then how is it related to PHPizabi?
PHPizabi V2 (which we named PHPizabi 2 VCP Orion) is built on top of the Open Orion platform. This means PHPizabi 2 isn’t a common social networking software package; it’s actually going to be a web-kit plugin for Open Orion.


How is that a good thing for PHPizabi?
The Open Orion platform is very different from PHPizabi or even from content management systems (CMS). The framework architecture that was designed for Open Orion allows tricks that are not quite possible (or very unpractical and uneasy) with actual CMS’s. PHPizabi could profit of that architecture by allowing PHPizabi sites to diversify.

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to tell what script a website runs? Most of the time, after the second page you visit on a website you can already tell it runs on PHPizabi or Dolphin or any other script out there. That is because the actual social networking scripts are bound to their structures and this makes all the sites running them very homogeneous even if lots of efforts are put into changing the theme.

As oO has been designed to deliver virtual content (remember VCP? Like in “Virtual Content Platform”!), the structure doesn’t stick to your website which allows you to make it very unique, have your very own features and organize it the way you want.

Another advantage is that oO reaches a wider group of users providing it can be used to build absolutely any kind of website. This speeds up bugs hunting, security issues discoveries / patch releases and this creates a bigger pool of community-developers who are going to publish enhancements for oO which can then be added to your website.

Finally, administrators that are actually running “not-quite-social” kind of websites that used PHPizabi only because it was the closest match to what they really wanted to build will be able to profit of the oO structure to really go on with their project by removing what they don’t want of PHPizabi and adding oO features to their website so it really becomes what it was meant to be.



The bottom line is that PHPizabi and Open Orion are not going to kill each other; they are going to work together as feature-completion of one-another. Both are built by the same development team and both have the same goal.



Details about oO to come on OpenOrion.com

Test... 1,2 1,2? Oh wow we're back online!

Hey it's been almost 2 months since the entire servers array went down! I can't believe we still hold our rank even after a downtime this long. Ok so to make a long story short, this is running on brand new servers now, I didn't have any time to get the latest backup of the databases before the old servers went down so you will experience issues with the site until I'm done rebuilding the databases and re-injecting the data into them. Expect a day or two before things go back to normal.

In the meantime you can poke me on Twitter or FaceBook, I'm gonna keep on updating the community with news as things are moving.

R!.