At the dawn of the age of PHP, I created a user management system (registration, verification, admin interface, …) that was based on well-established ideas (how login worked at Yahoo, Amazon, and every other process major site) but got no traction at all as a open source project. In any language that wasn’t PHP it would be necessary to write an “authentication module” which as about 50lines of cookie handling code. Multiple times I managed to out several existing apps together and make an advanced web site.

About 10 years ago the idea suddenly got traction once it was legitimized by the SAAS fad, I would tell people “don’t you know they’re going to end the free tier or go out of business or both?” and sure enough they did.

Anyhow, I bring it up because the system used M4 to interpolate variables into PHP, other languages, shell scripts, SQL scripts, etc.

Ugh, I know exactly how this feels. You resist the urge so hard to say “I told you so” and instead relish in the fact that you saw it. “The Way”, so to speak.

I remember having to write cgi cookie handling code. I remember having to write session-cookie sync code. PHP was a small slice of heaven in the cgi world. Until it wasn’t. Still, being able to import libraries of script functions without having to recompile was wizardry. The problem with php now is they let a certain product somewhat dictate their direction. Class namespaces with slashes is the ugliest design choice.

What was your oss project that couldn’t get traction?

It was called Tapir User Manager but the web site was down for some time. It was an open source failure but a career success because I used it around 8 projects including the arXiv preprint service, a voice chat service that got 400,000+ users, and the web site for our county green party (which had national impact.)

You need to combine it with Perl and a collection of other special passes, of course: https://web.archive.org/web/20180309134414/http://thewml.org...