By There's a new open source software for status pages available: Okazanta is a fork of Cachet, one of the most widely used software for status page.
What is a status page?
"Status Page" is the term for a small website describing historical or ongoing incidents, mostly used by Internet providers. A list of status pages software (free and non-free) can be found here.
Cachet has been used by many providers in the past, but the lack of updates and support for new PHP versions caused the project to stall.
But why a fork?
The main reason why a fork was necessary was that Cachet required PHP 7.3 to run. The PHP code was not optimized for newer PHP versions. Obviously PHP 7.3 is meanwhile end of life (since December 2021) and for security and performance reasons, it is advised to upgrade to a newer PHP version. Although there were a couple of pull requests to improve/update the code, these suggested changes unfortunately never made it into the core code.
A main discussion about the continuity of Cachet and an eventual fork erupted in May 2022, basically asking:
wondering if the project is maintained or it has been discontinued.
GitHub user esseti
This discussion eventually showed that the Cachet founder and maintainer James Brooks sold the Cachet project to apilayer, however they have never touched the code since:
Basically, I sold Cachet to apilayer a few years back. The idea was that they would continue development and use it to build out an ecosystem. […] Since then, apilayer haven't touched Cachet.
James Brooks, creator of Cachet
A couple of developers pitched in, mainly John-S4, pushing for a fork. A couple of months waiting time passed by if apilayer would revive Cachet, but nothing happened. Therefore Okazanta was created as a Cachet fork.
[…] a community fork arrived. Okazanta was forked from Cachet Q4 2022 with the goal to update the outdated Cachet code-base to run on newer (and supported) PHP […]
[…] once famous and discontinued open source status page project "CachetHQ". A community fork "Okazanta" was planned to revive CachetHQ – but the forked project ran into the same problem as the original CachetHQ project: Lack of time […]