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A TRIBUTE TO FRANSISCO BURZI
#60 - 0--Administrator--A TRIBUTE TO FRANSISCO BURZI--2006-12-19 16:22:59
PHP-Nuke is a huge CMS that is constantly being expanded by its wide community of users, dwarfing most of its rivals, with features ranging from news management to mailing lists, private messaging system and more. Find the term PHPNUKE in the search engines, and you'll be amazed by not less than 10 million pages will be listed. Wikipedia too, has a write up on PHPNUKE. Unfortunately not much is written about the creator or whom is known as the mother and father of PHPNUKE, Fransisco Burzi. More saddening, nobody wrote a single line yet about this great person in the Wikipedia. -
This prompted me to make a search on writings regarding him, unfortunately I only managed to get few old not so good interviews here and there. I remembered I have saved a good one in my old laptop in recent years and finally i got it - it was an exclusive interview once published by dangerscript.com. It was no longer there, not even the domain. I decided to republish it here which I renamed it : A TRIBUTE TO FRANSISCO BURZI.
The guy who is passionate about developing mixed his profession and passion and in the process created history as phpnuke.org, has become one of the most active communities in the world for open source web based portal application. Quite an Achievement!
That's Francisco Burzi Casciello, tall attractive confident man of 33 with a deep resonant voice, a role model for many budding developers. "My favourite films/movies category is SciFi and I love do***entals of any kind" says Francisco living in San Cristobal, Venezuela. His hobbies include astronomy and paleonthology. "I love Kitaro's music and New Age music in general" adds FBC. Born in Quebec, Canada on June 10, 1969, Francisco Burzi started working on open source portal system which took the world by storm since released on 26 June 2000.
1) How, when and why did the php-nuke project begin?
PHP-Nuke project beguns when I had a Linux news site in spanish language. It was a specific answer for my own specific needs on that site. After developing it in a record time of 3 weeks I just thought that would be cool to share the code with all my web site's fans. They asked for it and they got it.
It was a free software and open source advocate for a long time, so I wanted to follow my way of thinking and share it with the community. Also, there was a time when I asked myself why other open source advocates sites don't shared their codes (they still don't share it), making a nonsense mistery around a web site's code. But, as I mentioned, PHP-Nuke was born thanks to my specific needs in a certain moment.
The very first version of PHP-Nuke (1.0) was released on 26 June 2000 and its launch was followed by a big community that slowly converted in one of the most active communities for any web based application.
2) You have taken the Developer's Community by storm and the popularity of PHP has taken a whole new turn, What is the secret of your success?
I don't know if we can talk about secrets on the success of PHP-Nuke, anyway I think that this success was due to many factors. The name itself is strange but atractive and agressive, the initial product image was clean and I tried to maintain this way, the moment when people needed a free solution for a web site, a professional look on the application, the constant updates, code homogeneity, etc. made PHP-Nuke an application to use.
I don't know how much PHP-Nuke contributed to the popularity of PHP as a scripting language for the web. Its use has increased but maybe the destiny of PHP is exactly this: to convert itself into THE web scripting language of the future. Anyway, would be very interesting point to know what the people at PHP think about PHP-Nuke.
3) php-nuke has inspired many other open source projects like myphpnuke, postnuke, planetnuke etc. What is your reaction on this?
Great! I'm very happy with this. Part of the success of PHP-Nuke is that it inspired lot of other developers to follow a revolution, and I'm very happy to see that PHP-Nuke is the choice not only for users but for developers to base their own applications in mine. This is great, finaly they converts in competitors (if this is the correct word here) and each one needs to run its own way, but you can be sure that for me this is another way to feel good ;)
4) What is Francisco Burzi in real life?
I'm nothing special, or alien-like creature. I'm very normal. I love to stay in my house where I work and have all my stuff, in calm. I love calm and solitude. But solitude is, sometimes, impossible because my wife and my daughter. Sometimes I'm perfectionism, specialy in a computer but not too much in the real life.
I love technology and the new stuff but in the deep I'm simple (think about new age without the astrology stuff ;)). I have some hobbies like movies/do***entals, astronomy and paleonthology.
5) Does your passion for coding affect your family?
In some way yes. Usualy I work on the night and sleep on the day. This is because the internet connection in my country is better on the night, also the night hours are better to work at least for me. The good part is that my wife has a similar passion for the computer and stay with me a lot of time in the in-house office.
For my little 3 years old daughter I installed a PC with some educational games... looks like she will walk over my steps ;).
6) what is your advice to upcoming developers?
Persistence and hard work. Never fall and always look forward. If you have a good and innovative idea, the time for you will come, just wait and while you wait just work.
7) You might have received numerous fan mails in your developing career, Can u describe one mail which was really out of the world?
In 2 years developing PHP-Nuke just comes to my mind three very funny moments that people pointed me out. Starting the project, something like 6 months before the initial launch,
there was a guy that told me:
...Please, give thanks to your mom in my name for brought you to this world...
Before the first PHP-Nuke's birthday, I received an email saying something like:
...you don't created a program, nor this is a revolution, nor a movement... this is an epidemic...
And the last one was a guy that submitted a news to my site saying:
...Go to the Google.com and do a search for the term "god" and have a laught when you see PHP-Nuke as the first match!...
8) Working on and enhancing a Fully fledged open source portal system consumes a great amount of time and energy, How are you benefitted monetarily?
On past year 2001 I received a great financial support from MandrakeSoft, but they dropped this support from January 2002. Since my site receives something around 1,4 million page view per month I decided to start serving banners ads as a manner to have some income.
Now I'm surviving with the banners ads, monetary donations and some associates programs. I tried some other options by sending emails and faxes here and there trying to get financial support but I don't received a possitive answer yet. Isn't easy to live from this kind of income, you need to have a lot of visitors and many options to offer so you can get help from your community. But at least I can receive something in change and I can continue the project this way for now. And you touched the point: this is open source, and that is the main problem when searching some funds.
9) Now that the portal system is getting better and better all the time, what does the future hold for the project?
To be much more better ;)
Seriously, I would like to convert PHP-Nuke into a professional portal system. Slowly I'm doing this, and is the better way to do it.
PHP-Nuke will include, in future versions, all and any web based application/utility that webmasters needs. The idea is that webmasters only need to create their page layout (site's graphic theme and distribution) and start using the software
without worrying about technical details. An intelligent system that makes some obvious and practical choices and all and any module connected together with a strong and very stable kernel.
website: http://www.phpnuke.org
In this age of rapid pace and cut throat competition it is difficult to predict how many of these internet wizards are going to carry their success to the next logical stage but one thing is going to be sure that these internet personalities are going to inspire a whole lot of new generation to embrace Net in a manner that the achievements of Bill Gates and Sabeer Bhatia would pale in comparison!
