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I need an Idiot guide to eZpublish 3.1

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Author	Message
Ksenia L	Wednesday 16 July 2003 11:58:48 am Hello! I like eZpublish very much and it promisses that anyone without knowing any programming knowledge could use it. I'm the one who knows HTML only and experiences quite a big difficulties with eZpublish 3.1 design. Please, could you tell me if there is any Idiot guide to eZpublish 3.1 for those people who don't know programming? Please, help!!! Thank you
Mark Overduin	Thursday 17 July 2003 12:36:23 am I have programming experience, but it was a real pain in the ass to get started right away and do the things you want. The advice everybody is given to get to know ezPublish 3 is just to install the demo data and take a very good look at the templates (e.g. pagelayout_news.tpl). Then, when you are ready to get to the 'hard' stuff, copy the demo directories (/design/demo/ --> /design/mysite/ and /settings/siteaccess/demo/ --> /settings/siteaccess/mysite/). As you can see, you have to copy two directories. The one in the design dir and the one in the settings dir. You can reach this 'new site' by entering something like 'http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php/mysite/' in your browser. Just to check if it works. It probably does, because it's a complete copy of the demo :D. Anyways, now you have to edit some .ini files. They can be found in the settings directory. The following files need to be changed: /settings/siteaccess/site.ini.append /settings/siteaccess/override.ini.append (you can leave this one as it is, at this moment). This should get you started. You can find more useful hints elsewhere on the forum. Good luck. Mark ps; At first I thought I needed an idiot guide too, but 'fear not', you'll soon get used to ezPublish * edit * Take a look at this topic. Something I posted just about a month ago: http://www.ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/forum/setup_design/default_page_instead_of_creating_my_own
Katie D	Friday 18 July 2003 10:45:10 pm Well!! all I can say is good luck. I have most probably the same expertise as you, plus some php experience. I have spent untold hours with ezpublish and you know I even stuck with it. About 3 years ago I developed a really successful site using ez 2.1 and went through the same thing then. This time I battled through and developed a site using the shopping cart. Site almost done I needed a gateway. (Full stop) I posted messages here for help as I knew it was way beyond me. Errrr!! nothing - posted again even offering to pay - nothing. So the umteen hours I spent were totally wasted as I was running out of time. Sort of sad, but I had no choice. The good thing is Ez got me interested in CMS and I have now moved on to different programs that have good support, help, mailing lists and modules to help us idiots. For the shopping I used IC exchange, it was quick to learn, easy to set up and even though I encountered the same problem of a gateway I posted a message for help and got one written at a very reasonable cost in 2 days. Now I am also working with Typo3 and find I am not hitting all the stress and problems I hit here. Answers like - it will be coming in the future sometime, check the workflow docs, and I think it is in the wiki section isn't the type of help people like us need. The key to a good product is good documentation, howto's, and modules. Ez has non of these. It is a program for people who either have advanced knowledge of programming, or have the patience of a saint. I know I will be lambasted with replies regarding my entry here. I have read in previous postings which got a lot of longwinded discussion on the + and - of Ez. Such a pity though that the response for postings like this one genarate replies, and postings for help receive minimal or often no response. I do come back from time to time to see if there has been changes in the documentation etc., and Yes!! we know already you are working on it. My adiction with ez is over, it was hard, but there are other fixes out there which don't eat away at my brain and drain my body.
vito donatiello	Monday 21 July 2003 9:50:35 pm hi Katie, i was reading your post ... nobody is angry with u :) actually i was looking for more info about shopping cart ... i can't find the IC exchange u suggested ... could u help??? later, peace, vito
Red Bullbone	Tuesday 22 July 2003 7:43:40 am hm, well, i'm fiddling arount with ezPublish since over 2 weeks and have no real results to present... I think I have a lot of PHP-experience and already wrote some (yeah, somewhat smaller) CMSs ( http://www.spss.ch/ for instance ) in under one week... so, I'm not really happy with ezPublish...
Charles Okech	Tuesday 22 July 2003 9:24:15 am Well, I've been trying to set up a site with ezpublish for more than a month now and still cannot be able to present any real results yet. This is not only a problem for those without programming/PHP experience at all. Fact is, if one sets out to present such a large project (ezpublish does look like a large project), it is his/her responsibility to accompany it with clear well-written documentation, especially if they have to force others to learn their own proprietary template scripting language. It is not just enough to say "look in the demo site and start learning from there" or "look for hints in the forums" or "it will come in the next release". It becomes even sadder when one reads some of the arrogant and patronising answers the ezpublish crew give to queries from newbies who complain about the lack of proper documentation. This is not professional programming as I know it and the ezpublish crew should get down to producing proper documentation now, not tomorrow or in the next release, or you will be toast. You guys at ez should understand that not everyone has the time to learn by trial and error, not when one has to serve different clients who use different CMSs, each with their own proprietary template scripting language, certainly not me, when I have to divide my time between programming in Java and PHP.
Jerry Jalava	Tuesday 22 July 2003 10:35:12 am This thread has gone way over offtopic, but I have to continue a bit... I started using eZ in the beginning of this year when I got a project where I have to build BIG portal and the company wanted it to be made with eZPublish. So, no other choice than start studying and learning eZ and at the same time producing the site... In the beginning the documentation and forum wasn't even on this level and I had to study everything in the hard way. I was frustrated many times during the project and was ready to leave to whole thing, but kept telling myself that eZ is THE best CMS when it comes to making something really big and advanced... Right now (after five months of studying and building) the portal is almoust ready... And I start feeling comfortable with eZ. After I finnish this project I start helping others to learn eZ faster and making it easier to understand by documentations and contributions (I have learned what some people need to understand certain things of eZ ;) ). I really trust that eZ is going to be much better and easier for new users in near future... Regards, Jerry
Bård Farstad	Tuesday 22 July 2003 12:04:37 pm It would be great if you, who are new to eZ publish, could write up a list of questions you had/have a hard time to get answered. That will help us when we continue with improving the documentation. We've now just finished combining the documentation for eZ publish 3 here on ez.no. The next task is now to write more documentation. Mabye we should start a thread under suggestions for this. The more and structured questions we get, the simpler it will be for us to write good documentation. --bård Documentation: http://ez.no/doc
Charles Okech	Wednesday 23 July 2003 3:49:23 am Hi, great that you show some concern. While you are taking the time to create a home for suggestions, I'll continue a bit with this thread. Ok, let's start at the beginning. The setup. It is very frustrating when one has to spend 2 weeks on setting up ezpublish because one does not understand the overrride system for example. So how about a clear explanation of the override for a start? Setting up a system should not normally take more than a day if one takes a few hours to study the documentation. Next, the template operators and functions. It is just not enough to give a list of the operators and functions. The documentation should answer questions such as "what does it do?", "what are the parameters required?", "what do I do to achieve what I want to achieve?". Take the fetch operator for example. This seems to be a very important operator but the documentation does not help at all when one wants to learn how to use it. The modules, Oye.... Do I need to go on? Normally, it is quite possible to learn how to use any new software product by simply studying the documentation. Ezpublish should not be an exception especially when at first glance it seems to be such a great product. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth when one quickly realises that the documentation seems to have been a time wasting afterthought to the developers. Charles