Moving Forward

Original author Dan Huby is still the maintainer of ResourceSpace, which he works on nearly full time. Oxfam and other users periodically contract with Huby to add additional features.

In addition to enterprise customers, though, Huby says that more and more open source developers are starting to join the project – a change he welcomes. Huby credits the open source community with pushing the translation and internationalization effort in particular, but plugins and patches are increasing in number as well.

Now that the number of third-party contributions is increasing, Huby notes that the project is expanding from a small, informal team into a full-fledged open source effort that will require bug tracking and other infrastructure. The ResourceSpace code already is accessible through Subversion.

Huby cannot predict exactly what changes the future holds, although he says that reworking the interface is high on the list. The current release ships with three user interface themes, all of which can be customized through CSS, but which follow essentially the same layout and style guidelines. Huby wants to incorporate the Smarty templating engine into a future release to give users the power to customize their ResourceSpace experience thoroughly.

Meanwhile, if your business or project has trouble coordinating digital assets, particularly photos and videos, you might find that ResourceSpace is exactly what you need. Alternatively, if you simply have more image content than a desktop photo browser can handle, or you are tired of weeding through clouds of unstructured tags to find that one image you really need, then it might be time to consider the more powerful options provided by ResourceSpace.