History: Why ClearOS
Preview of version: 15
Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is to Drupal / Joomla! / WordPress what ClearOS is to CentOS / openSUSE / Ubuntu. #tikiwiki #clearos
— Marc Laporte (@MarcLaporte) September 16, 2017
- Tons of features
- Great integration (makes diverse tools have a consistent user experience)
- PHP
- As per Marc Laporte's suggestion, they moved to Bootstrap in v7
- Nice services from ClearCenter (remote backups, security audits, domain names, etc.)
- Strong feature set for on premise (Gateway and Networking)
- Generally satisfies the usual component criteria
Why not ISPConfig
ISPConfig was the original server admin panel component for WikiSuite (It was still called Tiki Suite back then), as you can see in slides from 2011
But ClearOS was picked.
WikiSuite is about having all the tools for one organization, and available on premise or in a data center.
- ISPconfig
- is for hosting many projects / customers on one server
- is focused on being in a data center (and not really tailored to an on premise installation)
- ClearOS
For an eventual offering of WikiSuite as SaaS, we will need a platform to manage multiple virtual machines, not a platform to manage shared hosting applications. See: Orchestrator.
We have been working with the ClearOS community to improve it as a hosting platform, and get some of the benefits of ISPconfig.
When is ISPConfig better? If you are a provider of shared hosting
Why not Webmin
Why not SME
- Release cycle is too slow (vs upstream)
Why not Zentyal
- Zentyal is more in Perl (while we preferred ClearOS's PHP)
On the good side, Zentyal is based on Ubuntu which has a nice and predictable release schedule.
Long after we started working with ClearOS, Zentyal chose to remove lots of functionality, including the web server.
In contrast, the WikiSuite project has lead to multiple enhancements to ClearOS as a web server (ex: Let's Encrypt, PHP version selection, better configs, better handling of multiple sites, etc.)
Why not NethServer
- 1st announcement of Nethserver on Distrowatch is in 2015, and the work with ClearOS was already underway.
- As of 2017, NethServer looks like a serious contender to ClearOS.