eZ publish Roadmap

Saturday 04 June 2005 5:37:15 pm

Hey Everrabody!

In the past week we have seen some exciting news from eZ systems http://www.ez.no/community/news

1. The release of eZ publish 3.6 (stable) on 5/30/2005
2. The release of eZ online editor 3 on 6/03/2005 <i>(compatible only with 3.6 or greater)</i>
3. The announcement of upcoming new support / services from eZ systems

4. The announcement of the <b>eZ publish Roadmap</b> on 6/04/2005
<i>http://www.ez.no/community/developer/roadmap</i>

So I have to ask you ...

1. What are your first impressions of the announcement / disclosure of the future of eZ publish + timelines?

2. What are your concerns?
3. What are <i>your</i> personal wants needs and desires?

4. What do you think we all will be doing and/or what will we all be focusing on during/through the published timeline:
<i>http://www.ez.no/var/ezno/storage/images/images/community/developer/roadmap/360075-1-eng-GB/roadmap_large.png</i>

hands the mic to the crowd
and walks away ...

//kracker
<i>RZA :: Ghost Dog - Way of the Samurai (Soundtrack) :: Samurai Showdown</i>

Member since: 2001.07.13 || http://ezpedia.se7enx.com/

Tuesday 07 June 2005 12:10:55 pm

- How compatible will eZ 3 extensions be with eZ 4

- What's the upgrade path, how will the upgrade path effect developers with existing custom extensions and components?

- Will the Online Editor 4 support localization, (internationalized) spell checking and ability to cut/paste from Word/OO (while retaining formatting)?

- Will eZ Publish 4 / OE have drag and drop related objects

- Will the Enterprise Components include XMLHTTP (access and manipulate eZ publish information dynamically via javascript)

- Will the eZ publish 4 Administrator have hooks to possibly support xmlhttp

- Will workflow be improved to true workflow?

- Will eZ Publish have a new "skin"

- Will there be new help in the administrator

What components would you like to see in eZ publish components and eZ publish 4?

//kracker

Buck65 : B.Sc.

Member since: 2001.07.13 || http://ezpedia.se7enx.com/

Wednesday 08 June 2005 9:37:03 am

In regards to the workflow:

Things that would make life easier:

1. Ability to create new work flow status codes or define where next to go in the workflow. (I.E. have more than a linear progression, have an item sent back for more work, or sent back two or more levels.)

2. Ability to clear items out workflow.

3. Ability to define workflows based on rolls rather than on user accounts or user groups.

4. Options to: reject item send to reject area (i.e. have a place where rejected items can be started back through the workflow rather than just being lost, like a predefined holding area), reject item send back for more work.

Current workflow "do it yourself" model requires way to much coding to be very useful. (Creating new modules & views for each workflow approval level, creating own db schema to hold crap, writing custom cronjobs to move stuff through system, etc.)

Regarding admin/edit templates:
1. Ability to show class attributes using permissions. I.E. "show all class attributes that "myUserRoll" can see.

2. Ability to edit and publish classes without displaying all class attribute form fields. I.E. we have the problem of "user of one level can change certain attributes of a custom content class, user2 can change other things. Being able to limit the display of what each user can edit and still publish the content object is proving highly problematic.

3. If you could reference things like roles, groups, classes, nodes, and what not by a textual identifier or token rather than by their ID this would make code & custom templates WAY WAY more portable. As it we end up using our own defines everywhere which is frustrating.

Anyhow hopefully this input helps! We're very excited about the future of eZpublish, it would just be even better if the workflow & editing systems were a bit more robust. (I.E. more community site focused and less merchant/payment gateway focused)

Thanks,
Nate Parsons

http://www.mindshare.net

Wednesday 22 June 2005 11:09:32 pm

Hi Gabriel

Whereas ezpublish is a flexible CMS but doesn't make it very easy to develop extensions (the object model is, uhm, suboptimal for a lot of things that go beyond basic CMS functionality). It's not so bad once you wrap your head around it, but it's far from being as productive as frameworks made for something like that.

I've been doing a lot of integration work with existing databases recently and find eZ publish framework extremely easy to work with. I'd estimate that it would cut down my development time by about a quarter to third through the use of the eZPersistantObject class.

I have been using eZ publish since 3 was in beta and spent a lot of time working out the eZ way of doing things. The Doxygen API docs on http://pubsvn.ez.no/ are a great place to start.

What would really help is this:
* Some kind of generic ORM that is based on actual tables with all fields for the data to be saved, not one attribute per entry.
* Generic create/update/remove functionality on top of that.
* Hooks for validation/business logic.

I think you may have missed the point. eZ Publish provides an object model based on relational databases. How the information is stored, or what it's stored in does not matter. In fact my understanding of object models is that you should be able to replace the persistence layer with whatever you want as long as the functionality is preserved.

eZ publish does provide a object model with generic create/update/remove functionality and the ability to add hooks for validation/business logic.

Now I'm not saying it's perfect but there is a pretty good framework on which to build extensions. Looking forward to the Components & V4.

Cheers
Bruce

My Blog: http://www.stuffandcontent.com/
Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/brucemorrison
Consolidated eZ Publish Feed : http://friendfeed.com/rooms/ez-publish

Wednesday 22 June 2005 11:21:00 pm

In terms of the roadmap - how long will the eZ V3 series be actively supported once V4 is released?

Cheers
Bruce

My Blog: http://www.stuffandcontent.com/
Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/brucemorrison
Consolidated eZ Publish Feed : http://friendfeed.com/rooms/ez-publish

Tuesday 28 June 2005 12:08:19 am

Hi

I'm just a beginner with eZ publish, but what I'd like to see in future versions is more functionality added to the admin interface.

Right now, you can manage your content inside the admin interface and do template overriding. But I read in the eZ book that you have to edit several ini-files in order to install a module.

I currently have to look up documentation at every step I do because it's not intuitive enough for unexperienced users. I'd like to have some kind of admin module interface where you can just install a module yourself without having to know which ini-files you have to open and what to insert there.

This goes for many of the settings in the system. For me there's still a little too much config editing.

So is it planned to include more config functionality in the admin interface in the upcoming versions?

Thanks a lot.
Chris

Sunday 03 July 2005 8:44:15 am

Hey Kracker

Yeah, I noticed these menues before, but the fact that I could select between several dozen config files didn't make me actually click on one. I get more and more into the whole paradigm, but it's still a lot to look up. It's always a hard process to begin with something new.

Me, for example, I'm used to work with Open Text's Livelink WCM Server which has a fat client visual node tree driven approach I'm used to. So I have to re-learn several stuff here, other ideas and ways.

So now I noticed that these settings can be comfortably edited, that's really nice. But nevertheless I find it hard to find my way through. It's too much configured in places I don't intuitively think of.

Anyway, as I am building my first test sites for a client I noticed the following:

* Finding the right template to override in the huge list of templates can be very frustrating because you only have paging numbers to scroll through and cannot search for it.

* Being in the template list, it's confusing not to know under what circumstances which template does override what. Once configured, it's written into a config file. Would be nice to have it visualised in the GUI aswell. Especially the template stuff should be visible in some way as it's the core point for the presentation layer. Reading through the config file is too abstract to work efficiently.

* The template debug stuff is very nice as it's the only way of seeing which templates are used on a page.

So for me the most interesting thing are features that visualise more of the actual system configuration in some way.

Cheers
Chris