Stuff and Content

Federico Cargnelutti has listed a number of Open Source PHP applications that he believes has changed the world over the last 10 years and eZ Publish makes the list. As with any lists of this nature, every one has their own opinion, and the comments make good reading. One that isn't on the list or commented on is PHPList . What's missing in your option?

If you want to know what's happening with eZ publish then it seems that the Paris Developer day was the place to be. You can read Damien Pobels excellent write up of the event (French). If like me your French is limited to "hello", "goodbye" and asking for a beer here's an English translation via google translate. Not perfect but you'll get the idea. Thanks Damien!

The report compiled from the Australian Open Source Industry & Community Census has been released. I've only have the chance to skim over it at the moment, but my initial impression is that it looks very professional, contains quite a bit of detail and is interspersed with practitioner "stories". http://waughpartners.com.au/2008/04/07/australian-open-source-industry-community-report

My membership of the e Z Approve 2 project has been given the green light so as a follow up to my previous post Using Git with eZ Publish projects I can present the output of the commits back to the subversion repository. $ git-svn dcommit Authentication realm: eZ projects Password for 'zabbie': A design/standard/templates/node/view/plain.tpl Committed r2501 M eventtypes/event/ezapprove2/ezapprove2type.php Committed r2502 M classes/ezxapprovestatususerlink.php Committed r2503 M collaboration/ezapprove2/ezapprove2collaborationhandler.php Committed r2504 M collaboration/ezapprove2/ezapprove2collaborationhandler.php Committed r2505 A design/standard/templates/node/view/plain.tpl r2501 = e5a186160c1fab07a2894d180f932e3a6931b782 (git-svn) M eventtypes/event/ezapprove2/ezapprove2type.php r2502 = 43c5b3ba16bf4015ee8f9c2f2a1a9e4d4333972d (git-svn) M classes/ezxapprovestatususerlin...

In my spare time I've been hanging out with a bunch of Ruby/Rails people. They are a fun bunch however they don't seem to like it when you point out that MVC existed well before Rails. One thing that have put me onto is Git. Git is a distributed revision control / software configuration management project. You may have heard of it, Linus Torvalds (that clever guy behind Linux) wrote it to manage kernel development. There is plenty to read about it on Wikipedia So why Git? This week I've been working on an eZ Publish 4.0 project that needed the ezApprove2 workflow extension. The version in the contribs says it has 3.7 support...the eZ projects site says it work with 3.x..no 4.0 except in the subversion repository on the projects site! So I check it out svn co http://svn.projects.ez.no/ezapprove2/ezapprove2/ezp4/trunk/extension/ezapprove2 to investigate if it meets the requirements. As part of this process I notice some bugs and being a good open source user I fix th...

I've just uploaded a rating module to the contribution section on the eZ site. The Star Rating module introduces a datatype that can be added to any content classes to allow it to be rated. While I haven't checked the datatype has been designed so it should be possible to add multiple ratings to a single content class. The extension has been designed with accessibility in mind and will function without javascript, images or CSS. The catalyst for the extension was CSS star rating from Komodo Media and the extension contains CSS and images from this project. To add some web 2.0 goodness, if the xajax extension is enabled and the user has access ratings will be done via ajax calls. The xajax component requires newer versions (0.5+) of the xajax library so it must be downloaded from the projects site an not from the contributions section of the eZ site. View caching & dynamic content One of the issues I came across is that by making the rating a datatype, is that the d...

Recently I've been playing about on the eZ Publish projects site and have joined a couple of projects. One that I've previously has some involvement in is Kristof's xajax plugin . I quite like xajax as it's takes care of most of the javascript and allows you to manipulate the browser DOM via PHP. I've joined the project as a member, updated the xajax libraries to 0.5 beta 4 ( they were on beta 2) and created a download . Initially I was going to upgrade the extension to work with eZ 4.0, however there was nothing to do. It works fine in eZ 4.0 and my changes are simply an upgrade to the xajax library. Given the extension basically exposes the xajax libraries and is unlikely to change too much I wonder it it's worth linking the version of the extension to the xajax library version? Happy xajaxing!

Disclaimers usually go at the bottom of a post but because this one is quite lengthy I've decided to put it at the top. Mostly the stuff I post here is of a technical nature, but this time I'm posting an option piece, and as such it is full of wild speculation, personal thoughts, suggestions and of course opinion, all of which may have no basis in any reality other than my own. You are here - the current state of play I've been using eZPublish 4.0 since the beginning of the year. It's not quite what I envisioned when the rumbling of version 4.0 first started, oh so long ago, actually it's nothing like what I imagined. Hence the title of this post. Initially Vista (Longhorn) was slated as a "minor step" between Windows XP (Whistler) and Blackcomb. However it gradually took on many of the features slated for Blackcomb. People got excited, but it's release was delayed several times, the developers were given other priorities and finally development ...

I realise that with the newish (introduced in version 3.9) "file" mail transport option can be used to debug mail, but in some cases it's easier if the system actually sends the mail (to me and not the intended precipitant). So I've updated the subversion repository of Kristof Coomans' eZMail Debug patch to work with eZ Publish 4.0.0 To use, simply download the patched ezmail.php from http://pubsvn.ez.no/community/trunk/hacks/ezmaildebug/patches/4.0.0/lib/ezutils/classes/ezmail.php and save it to lib/ezutils/classes/ezmail.php of your eZ Publish 4.0.0 install. Remember that if you are using SMTP transport..." Due to a bug in eZ Publish 4.0.0, you need to download the updated version of the "ezsmtp" class and replace the corresponding file in your installation in order to use an SMTP relay server for mail delivery. This bug will be fixed in the upcoming eZ Publish 4.0.1 release. " (From http://ez.no/doc/ez_publish/technical_manual/4_0/ref...

In response to some good suggestions I've just released version 1.1 of the reCAPTCHA extension for versions 3 & 4 of eZ Publish. The main changes are: Support for multiple/domain keys Utilising the permissions/role system to implement by pass of the captcha As a side effect of the latter, the admin user will not have to fill out captchas. Download from: http://ez.no/developer/contribs/applications/recaptcha_ez3 http://ez.no/developer/contribs/applications/recaptcha_ez4 Please let me know about your sites that are using the extension, either via comments here or on the contribution pages at eZ.

This morning I created a eZ 3.x version of the reCAPTCHA extension. The changes were pretty simple and included: Modifying the return vales in the datatype to be constants Made the method parameters references in the datatype Removed any static/public/private method declarations The eZ 3.x version can be downloaded at http://ez.no/developer/contribs/applications/recaptcha_ez3

The other day I came across a site that was using the reCAPTCHA CAPTCHA. I'd heard of the project but hadn't had time to investigate. The reCAPTCHA project (of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University ) provides both text and audio CAPTCHAs via a web service. It uses words scanned from books in the Internet Archive that have failed to be recognised by OCR, so using this on your site is helping to digitalise those books. See http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html for more info on how it works. With the Christmas break and the fact that we've had an intense low hanging about for the duration (strong winds & rain) I thought I'd check it out and see how easily it could be integrated into eZ Publish. Turns out it was pretty simple. I've created an extension with a reCAPTCHA datatype that can be used in both regular content class (for forums, comments etc.) and as a information collector (feedback forms etc.). The datatype doesn't store a...

Nielson Norman Group (NNG) have released a free report (usually retails for $124 USD) into accessibility called: Beyond ALT Text:Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities 75 Best Practices for Design of Websites and Intranets, Based on Usability Studies with People Who Use Assistive Technology 7mb PDF download available from the NNG group website at http://www.nngroup.com/reports /accessibility/ Pass on the good karma and make your sites more accessible over the holiday break! Note: The report is from 2001

Waugh Partners is launching the first national research project to study companies and contributors involved in the Australian Open Source industry and community. With growing demand for Open Source skills and technology, it's the perfect time to launch a major research effort to understand the strength of Open Source in Australia, the economic potential for the broader Australian ICT industry, our skills capacity, and the symbiotic relationship between the Open Source industry and community around it. The resulting report will be released as a free PDF in February 2008 The census closes next Friday (30 Nov) so if you are working with or providing Open Source products, technologies or services in Australia visit the Census page and fill it out!

Packt Publishing have just released a new eZ Publish related book titled, Managing eZ Publish Web Content Management Projects written by Martin Bauer . Firstly I must state that in the past I worked with the author of this book for a number of years at designIT . I've been involved in many of the projects mentioned in the book as well as discussed and work-shopped many of the techniques both with and with out the assistance of a cold frothy beer or two. This book isn't as much a step by step technical guide to creating an eZ Publish site but a series of observations and techniques that can help in specifying, delivering and managing medium to large web based content management projects. While the title and some of the content imply an eZ publish focus, most of the advice could be applied to web content management in general regardless of the platform. The tone of the book is quite informal which makes it easy to read. The book takes the reader through the stages of the Sof...

This Friday is my last day with designIT. In July designIT was sold and I made the decision not to continue on with the new company. Currently I don't have any plans apart from having a few weeks off, knocking down a brick wall and finding work a little closer to home. I thought I'd take a trip down memory lane before I have my mind scrubbed ready for whatever comes next. I started with designIT in October/November 2002 working on an online version of a survey that is sent to all university graduates in Australia. While this project was progressing another project was starting that used a CMS called eZ Publish produced by a little company on the other side of the world. Initially the project was to use version 2.0 but given that version 3.0 was to be released soon it was decided to postpone development until it was released (well the beta at least). Much of the development was based on beta versions of eZ publish and the site went live before the initial 3.0 version was ac...

Update: Thanks to some pointers from Derick Rethans the locale is now complete and up on the eZ site. I'm in the process of doing a spring clean and came across an Indonesian locale that I created for a multilingual project we completed some time ago: http://www.universitasaustrali.com.au/ The locale in incomplete in that I have not been able to establish the short names for days and months. It's good enough to use for most cases (not sure where and if the short names actually get used) and have released it as a contribution: http://ez.no/community/contribs/internationalization/indonesian_locale If anyone can help to complete it please drop me a line.

I've updated the subversion repository of Kristof Coomans' eZMail Debug patch to work with eZ Publish 3.9.2 To use, simply download the patched ezmail.php from http://pubsvn.ez.no/community/trunk/hacks/ezmaildebug/patches/3.9.2/lib/ezutils/classes/ezmail.php and save it to lib/ezutils/classes/ezmail.php of your eZ Publish 3.9.2 install.

One of the things I love about eZ publish is that it's so configurable and often settings can be used in ways that were not thought of when introduced. In version 3.8 the ability to add and override HTTP headers was introduced (from what I can tell to allow for fine tuning of cache related headers). In the most basic terms a web service is the ability to provide machine readable data (typically XML) over a network. eZ publish has the ability to provide RSS feeds which is contained within it's own module . However this is quite limited. eZ also come with a SOAP library that would allow the coding of services . The introduction of the httpd header overwrite feature allows for eZ Publish to use the templating system and the content within the site to produce any data you require, i.e. no php coding required. It also allows for the data feeds to be dynamic and relative to the existing web content. The process in a nutshell is: create a layout for the webservice (layout.ini) ov...

James Robertson of Step Two Designs has published an article titled " 11 usability principles for CMS products " The article discusses indepth the following principles: minimise the number of options be robust and error-proof provide task-based interfaces hide implementation details meet core usability guidelines match authors' mental models support both frequent and infrequent users provide efficient user interfaces provide help and instructions minimise training required support self-sufficiency I think thats it's a pretty impressive list and one that any CMS on the market will have trouble meeting today. eZ Publish while not perfect meets many of the principles at least in some aspect. When I have a bit more time (yeah right) I may evaluate eZ based against these principles in more depth. Making something as complex as a CMS especially one as feature packed and complex as eZ Publish usable is a huge task but in the end it is a tool that has to be used and usi...