KompoZerI’ve realized today there’s been over 1.5 million downloads of KompoZer 0.7.10 on SourceForge.net (plus how many localized builds and alternate download sites?)

  • 4 million unique visitors on kompozer.net.
  • 8 000 visitors / day (average over the last month)
  • way to many hours spent on this project, I prefer not to count them
  • few donations but many messages, among which:

I just wanted to thank you for keeping "Nvu" alive with Kompozer. I switched from Linspire to Ubuntu, but I still use Kompozer regularly. Thank you!

Kevin Carmony, former Linspire CEO, oct. 2007.

I started this project because as a moderator on Geckozone (french-speaking support forum for Mozilla apps) I got tired of explaining how to work around the bugs in Nvu instead of fixing them. I had developed a few extensions that could help a bit, but many bugs couldn’t be fixed that way.

Since Nvu 1.0 has been released in 2005, its development has been stopped and it’s been impossible to submit any patch. I would’ve preferred to keep the name, but Linspire (who sponsored Nvu) never allowed me to — hence the new name/icon. Lately, Linspire has even dropped nvu.com and the user forum. I guess the guy who bought the nvu.com URL gets most of the donations for this project…

I must say I still doubt wysiwyg HTML editors are really useful for web development. Such tools are fine for quick mockups, for educational purposes or to write long HTML documentations, but modern web development relies on server-side scripts which aren’t editable by Nvu/KompoZer — most PHP templates can’t even be edited this way. If I had some time or financial support, I’d rather build a wysiwyg HTML/CSS editor on OpenKomodo to have both wysiwyg *and* source edition.

Anyway, I didn't expect so many downloads. Looks like I should spend a few cycles to update this app. :-)