Summer of 2020
Today I built a website for a customer again… finally. The last site I did dates back from a couple of months ago. It really feels like I’m retiring. But I’m not, nowhere near actually.
I did it in Mobirise - the free edition - even though I have a commercial license. That’s because I want my customers to be able to take over the site after I hand it over.
Some say Mobirise is boring. And that’s true. Especially the free edition is… plain stupid & simple. But it works. Customers DO understand how to drag/drop a block, add an image, edit a text, and next click publish. So they’re happy.
I have 2 accounts at Mobirise. One for my commercial license, the other for the free one. All it takes is 2 different email addresses. Not very complicated in the end. But you also need 2 different computers to handle this. And that’s a little annoying.
It sure looks like Wix is everywhere these days. They must have a very appealing reseller/affiliation program. I personally think Wix is extremely expensive compared to self hosted solutions like WP, Mobirise or QuickerSite.
Talking about QS… It still hurts to realize we didn’t make it. Because QS (still) is the most reliable, the fastest, the most versatile CMS I could ever have come up with. The galleries, the formbuilder, the newsletter, the intranet, the forums, the list pages, … these were all very useful features. And they still are. I recently (few weeks ago) uploaded quite a few improvements to the QS GitHub repository. Mainly cosmetical changes, and things related to HTML5 (finally). Small improvements for all sorts of forms and the QS formbuilder.
But those updates do not change the fact that QS is dead. But not yet buried.
My aspLite experiment ended up nowhere too, and no one seems to understand where this could have lead to, or how it could have put classic ASP back on track. But as MS is focusing more on hosted services (Azure, Office 365, Xbox Live, GitHub and more) it’s becoming clear that guys (or small companies) like me have absolutely no impact on the future of their hosting/developing products. We’re on our own. So they are. It’s sad. Open source technology has taken over this past decade.
Take care!
- Bob says: (08/08/2020 11:52:46)By coincidence I edited a QS site today. I got my "activation" email on 26/04/2008. So twelve years later QS is still the best CMS I have found or used (and I think I have used them all)
- David says: (09/08/2020 13:47:21)Me too Bob, I still have a few clients on QS and they never give me any problems. SEO is getting to be an issue on some of the older ones but that's mostly to do with responsiveness and missing SSL
I just updated a test site with the new codebase on GitHub but not seeing any obvious changes, maybe it's mostly to do with the inner workings.
Good to hear from you both, keep safe :-) - Mik says: (15/08/2020 08:06:07)Also me, I still have more customers using QS. I have always believed that QS is the best CMS, which is due to all the points you are making on Pieter. Too bad there is no further development on QS. But it's never too late .... :-).
- Pieter says: (15/08/2020 12:00:29)Thanks guys! Well QS is on GitHub now... Everything has been put in place to save it for the future and keep it alive somehow.
The truth is: in these past 6 months, it has had 0 issues, 0 pull requests, 0 actions, etc... And it barely had visitors and/or downloads.
Lately QS suffered from some issues due to recent Microsoft changes to OLEDB drivers (I assume) causing some features in QS to crash (like creating, copying, deleting sites). I *think* they have been solved by now.
The thing is, as long as QS is my personal playground, nobody will feel comfortable adding things to it... or taking the lead in one way or the other. And the ASP code is sooo complicated (and scrambled) that it's nearly impossible to start making serious changes... That's how I see it at least...
