Plugging in
This business of being a sysadmin, even in the small and limited way I am one, doesn’t turn out to be the drunk-on-geekly-power experience it’s sometimes touted as.
See, I want to install this gizmo that gives individual DSpace submitters their own mini-CVs. It’s a nice gizmo, works well, would be a great draw for potential submitters…
… and I’m not going to install it, because it’s not a real plugin; it monkeys with existing code. I’m not willing to commit to the additional upgrade hassles, particularly the danger that I might not be able to upgrade at all for a serious length of time because I can’t afford to break the new gizmo.
If DSpace were further along in the development curve, I wouldn’t be as upset; I could stand to wait a bit to let the gizmo developers over at Rochester catch up. As it stands, though, every new release of DSpace adds serious new functionality. I don’t want to delay upgrades any longer than I absolutely must.
This too will pass. Eventually we get a real plugin architecture. I’m finding it silly hard to wait, though.