There seems to be a clear and present need for open source classified ad software.
Noah’s have changed their business model to so say compete with the “big dogs”. there aren’t that many dogs out there and they all appear to be charging $100+ USD per year for the software licence and support. Some are even dearer.
There are a couple of plugins for Joomla and for WordPress, which let you have the full CMS experience, but these are also released on a commercial licence, all be it much cheaper than the “big dogs”. The WordPress theme/plugin even offers unlimited upgrades. (I hope they never follow Noah’s classifieds example and screw their users over for updates).
When I think of the big dogs of Internet software, I think of things like Joomla, WordPress, ZenCart and OSCommerce. All of which are released on a free Open Source licence. The functionality and architecture of all these urinates from a great height on all the commercial licence software I have ever seen.
One of the things that gets me about the recent Noah licensing change is the withdrawal of support for those of us who are still in their first year of licensing. We are now being encouraged to get community support within a new Owner’s Forum. What’s even worse is that there only appears to be one Noah Developer active in that forum. He is as helpful as he can be, but he still exhibits the same like it or lump it attitude towards missing features the “community” is crying out for. I still haven’t got the upgrade that fixes the bugs that stop my site from working. I’m beginning to suspect I’m on some sort of blacklist.
Within the Open Source community, you expect to get support from a forum and you really do get good support. The software is usually built towards being easy to understand and change. I’m damned however if I am going to hack the code in Noah to the extent I need to and submit it towards the code when someone else intends making money out of it. Noah’s code is so Object Oriented it’s bloody difficult to find out where the bit you want is and even more difficult to change it. Zoltan the original developer is Hungarian and so the comments are all in Hungarian too, which is obviously OK if you speak Hungarian (I don’t').
An Open Source Classified Ad software with the ability to charge money for ads would be a real junkyard dog. I know someone with their own classified ad software in PHP/MySQL. I am going to try and persuade him to release it on the GPL. All it would need then is a PayPal shop integration. Why would he do that when he can try to sell the code? Well, for a start he would get unlimited free development and support for the product, so he wouldn’t have to pay anyone to do that. The new features would develop from the community and he would get massive traffic through his site which he could then monetize with advertising. Plus as the author of the software he would get great kudos, which even if you can’t spend it in Tescos, would get him more work, doing custom installations and themes and other work based on his new reputation.
So Dean, if you read this. Release the code, get rich from the proceeds with no additional investment. It’s a no-brainer.
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Dean isn’t keen. I am going to continue to nag him as it really is in his best interests!
@King Ghidora: (cute name): I respectfully must disagree with you on this topic. I don’t believe we need another OS *anything;* there are a bazillion OS projects and there must be 200 OS Classifieds systems, most of them cheerfully and over-optimistically listed on Hotscripts. As someone who has used both OS/GPL and “paid” software, I’ll stick with the latter, *generally* speaking (my experience with Noah’s aside).
The overweening problems with OS tend to be twofold; generally, the documentation is non-existent, and there is almost always a supercilious attitude on the user forums of “if you’re not smart enough to figure out this code on your own, you’re not smart enough to use it,” which I, rather unreasonably, find off-putting. (See EZPublish for the MOST notorious version of this attitude). There are some not free, but cheap classifieds systems out there that, depending upon your need, are really pretty decent; I rather like PHPMyDirectory, which is robust and well-thought-out, although visually it needs help. That one runs about $100USD. Cubrosoft has a cute little package out, it’s almost free, about $45USD, which has smarty templates…it needs a little tweaking but the basics are there. What does NOT exist is one damned good Classifieds system with PROFESSIONAL support available and remotely decent functionality and documentation. Not one.
And that’s the pisser, isn’t it? I mean, Moses on a Pony, this stuff ain’t rocket science. Classifieds are NOTHING but paid content, pure and simple. You get x fields for y dollars, and if you want to get fancy, you get x more fields for y more dollars. Some categories, a title, a description box, phone, address; then the “goodies,” i.e., paid pictures, google maps, Youtube embeds (if you’re brave enough)… none of these things are actually HARD. How hard IS it to do something which is really as simple as setting an expiration date of a, b or c?
But trying to find one package that has all these things together seems to qualify you as Ahab. I had one package that has all these features, but the checkout function is back-asswards, and my users were intimidated by the interface, which obviously isn’t a viable solution, either.
It constantly surprises me that no one yet has developed this as a salable product, given the extraordinary demand for Classifieds. It could be that developers don’t think that there is enough money in it (let’s face it, Noah’s “overwhelming popularity” of 11 million downloads is because it was FREE), but the 68Classifieds people seem to be eating okay.
I think the *problem* with classified ad software is that the people buying it don’t manage their expectations of the functionality.
If you are intending to start an on-line business based on classified ads then you really ought to have a proper business model and a list of functionalities that enable you to get the software custom written to your specific requirements.
If it’s really a a business then even buying a $1000 dollar piece of software is a drop in the ocean compared with your total cost for marketing and promotion. If you ever watch Dragons Den, the on-line pitches always allocate tens of thousands towards their marketing campaigns. Within those sort of scales, then getting custom software written for a few thousand really makes sense.