I have not had any luck in adapting OwnCloud because of the lack of community knowledge and documentation. So I took some time to strip it down to its components. In the end OwnCloud just seems to be Web GUI for SabreDav. After a little hunting and research I found that I could get a more robust and customizable solution by using Drupal as frontend (authorization, uploads, CalDav UI) for my own SabreDav server.

Both Drupal and SabreDav have enough documentation, community and interest by php developers to get me over any obstacles I believe. SabreDav has an excellent OOP plugin system and I found some sandbox code for Drupal SabreDav and CalDav modules.

The only real difference I can find would be that OwnCloud uses Mirall and another protocol to sync things.

Anyone know of any really big differences or missing features that would arise from doing this? Am I wrong in thinking that OwnCloud is a wrapper for SabreDAv?

I posted this to the OwnCloud mailing lists a few days ago. So far I have not gotten any answer other than "read the ( non-existent) documentation".

So how does it work? There are no development documents, blog post or anything in the mailing list about how OwnCloud works. Granted it is an open source project and anyone can join in but we need a starting point. I have yet to find anything on the API, architecture or even comments in code that would allow to do more than just stare at the screen of my IDE in abject ignorance. Worse I can't fix anything that is broken because I have no idea where to go to find anything.

I have looked at the wiki, github documentation, googled 20 pages down and searched through the mailing lists. Nada, nothing, zip.

It seems to me I have been here a hundred times before. A company promotes their software as being open source. They want "community help" but they obfuscate everything about the software by hiding critical information on it's internals. Worse, the only way of getting information is to purchase support which would not be necessary if proper documentation was available.  It's a form of disguised software protectionism that I really despise. If you have ever read any of my previous blogs you know that I will write about such things until they end. Check out the Simple Machines Forum articles I wrote ( they are somewhere in Google ) which lead to them finally changing (http://www.simplemachines.org/about/opensource.php) their screwed up interpretation of open source. Though they still have not gotten it completely as shown by the conflict in the first and third statements of their license amendments.

1. Retain the entire Simple Machines copyright and licensing notice in every file.
2. Make clear that the changed product is not the same as the original Simple Machines software (SMF or any other product).
3. Do not use the Simple Machines name (or the names of any Simple Machines contributors) to endorse or promote the modified software.

Ahh well, it is at least a partial victory if not a total awakening.  I have a feeling that I will have to use the same activism to bring OwnCloud into the reality of ( "community edition" does not mean open source ) what the spirit of open source truly means.

OwnCloud is garnering financing, promoting their services and gaining popularity by blowing the open source horn. While they may be giving out free source code it is by no means in the spirit of open source.  The label "community edition" is the tell. How many times have I seen those words and believed that a company is serious about open source? Not once.

OwnCloud,  If you want help with promoting, using and developing for your software then you are going to have to come up with more than a few dead links and blank pages in a wiki.

OwnCloud is great for the end user and might satisfy many companies in it's basic form. But enterprise level open source software it is not. There are not enough pluses to offset the minuses caused by a lack of information and community involvement depends on this in the beginning.

So far OwnCloud is a black box ( or dark cloud you might say ) and I am not impresssed. But I am open to change. So hopefully someone in the core or development group has enough time to swing me to the otherside by providing some real basics on how to customize and develop apps for OwnCloud.

Own cloud stuff:

I have a problem with my user_saml app. 

The problem:  

I used some javascript code on my apps/user_saml/js to override the view where the login form appear in order to print an URL to my SAML login.

In the past it worked, but now something changed on OwnCloud and now this js code is not loaded until the user tries to log with some credentials.
Seems like the app modules aren't loaded in the main view that shows the login form until the user have interacted with the system.

Is there an easy solution?   I have not idea about how the new version of OwnCloud works and sure that someone can help me to fix the user_saml app.

Solutions:

Ok I found that in order to load the app at the begginning, It is required to set the app as 'prelogin''s type
(At appinfo/info.xml   put on the '' value,  then the app will be loaded at the beginning).



Also I made a workarround to fix the problem that I'm not allowed to load apps/user_saml/auth.php

I load ?app=user_saml

And in the appinfo/app.php  I check if exists a $_GET['app'] = 'user_saml' and them execute the logic of the auth.php



But I'm still waiting for a solution of how enable views directly loaded at the browser.