How many hours have you lost installing and testing ezpublish?

Thursday 15 May 2003 10:10:47 am

How many hours have you lost installing and testing ezpublish?

I assume every community member has lost between 100 and 200 hours.
And I am sure no anybody who invested less than 100 hours in ezpublish is able to answer the simplest question.
I know for certain that I have invested more then 100 hours, maybe 200 and I am not able to answer the following questions:

What is the difference between a virtual host (VH) and a non virtual host (nVH)? and therefore

Is a virtual host installation possible locally on Windows and on Linux?

Is a virtual host installation possible on a remote computer with hosted IP address? and therefore

Is a virtual host installation possible on a computer with a share hosted IP address or only on a dedicated server?

Is it possible to install ezpublisch in a subfolder or only in a home root?

Which constellation depend on whether you have to install ezpublish matching URL , host, host map and so on?

I suppose there are hundreds of other questions which I am not able to answer!
And what I can see from the forum the other members have more problems than I have.
Hardly any question is answered in the forum, almost not in the needed details.

Assuming every member has spent about 100 hours in the installation and testing of ezpublish and assuming that ez is worth 300.00 US $. From this it would result that every member is ready to work for 3.00 $ per hour?!

Would not be better If the community make a plan to write a manual "How to install and use ezpublish step by step? " instead of loosing hours and hours in the forum without any success? Each member could decide by himself what part of manual is he or she ready to write.

This manual could be sold at a price of $ 50.00 after completion.
However, 50 $ would be cheaper than to spend hundreds and hundreds of hour?

Any discussion on this topic would be appreciated.

Claudius

Thursday 15 May 2003 1:07:01 pm

I was lucky because I could install for test both ez 2.xx and 3.0. Until now when it stopped when a tried to begin from scratch again with the last package - the result: blank site.

Any way, my point in this discussion: I would appreciate even a "quick start".
Supposing I succeeded perform installation. It is time to test some simpler site. E.g. a main site, a simple menu with News and Articles, maybe a Picture Album.
Creating "content" (Sections, Maps, Articles, News) is easy and intuitive in Ez's Administration interface.
But how can I disable or enable menus in the user site? By templates or? Anyway I self I would welcome an explanation from A to Z for some simple cases. With a minimal involving of concepts, just to see if one can do something working.

Regards,
George P.

Thursday 15 May 2003 2:47:47 pm

Hi All,

I'm a newbie to EZ and am in the throes of trying to get it configured properly. Claudius has mentioned many of the same questions and confusions I have. I've been combing through the manual, sdk and forums now for about 40 hours and I still don't have it set up.

Thank you Jo, for the clarification on MatchOrder depending on whether or not one has virtual host or not. (This distinction is not mentioned in any of the documentation.)

Can someone please show me what the code for a MatchOrder=uri for multiple sites would look like

settings/override/site.ini.append.php

[SiteAccessSettings]
CheckValidity=false
MatchOrder=uri

Do I put anything else here ??

Thanks for your help ;-)

Maggie

Thursday 15 May 2003 11:01:28 pm

Hi Maggie

The configuration for a non virtual host setup can be like this:

[SiteAccessSettings]
MatchOrder=uri
HostMatchType=map
HostMatchMapItems[]=mybookstore.com/mysite/index.php/user;user
HostMatchMapItems[]=www.mybookstore.com/mysite/index.php/user;user
HostMatchMapItems[]=admin.mybookstore.com/mysite/index.php/admin;admin

In this example we will have a server called mybookstore.com where we place our eZ publish installation in a directory called mysite under the http root of the server.

For more information about site access, go to http://www.ez.no/manual/install/siteaccess

Jo Henrik Endrerud | System Developer @ Seeds Consulting | http://www.seeds.no

Friday 16 May 2003 1:00:50 am

I think I see the pattern to these types of issues. They relate to general knowledge of your system environment and not the eZ publish environment.

If you understood your operating system, how networks work, how DNS works and how MySQL, PHP and HTML work then the learning curve for eZ is an easy one.
Now, the problem comes where your knowledge in a certain areas is lacking. Your end goal is to get eZ working and it is the package your trying to install, so as a result all your frustration comes out at eZ and on the forums.

How do we solve this type of forum query where the support required is not specific to eZ publish? This could be that eZ does not work because, say, a user is trying to setup a virtual host without DNS setup or can't get a database connection becuase MySQL has been munged?

We have all been in the situation of not knowing things and everyday, I, like most people enjoy learning new things. Maybe there needs to be a required reading for people new to eZ and CMS development. The current contribution documentation is a great help but not if you do not have a basic knowledge of certain subjects. We need to give this subset of people a step-up to a point where they can use the contributed documentation and have a basic understanding of the problem so their posts can be focussed and easer to answer, a good questions gets a good answer and all that.

I will not lie to people learning about systems and environments then programming takes time its not something that you get overnight, but learning this stuff is the most rewarding thing you can do IMHO.

So a recommendation:
* A beginners reading list, this can be online or treeware (I still love books, and I have associated learning with them so its a hard habbit to break, but other may be luckier).

This should cover things like :
-A beginners guide to Apache
-A beginners guide to MySQL
-A beginners guide to DNS
-A beginners guide to VI or EMACS
-A beginners guide to Linux
-A beginners guide to HTML and standards
-A beginners guide to PHP
-A beginners guide to SVN
-A beginners guide to Character sets and unicode
-A beginners guide to SMTP (email)

Now these don't need to be written by eZ, there are links and books on this subject all over the web. Of course feedback on these will be vital from the community so they can be refined over time just like all things. Hopefully this will help people get the basics without needing to come to the forums for items that are not really eZ problems.

Tony

Tony Wood : twitter.com/tonywood
Vision with Technology
Experts in eZ Publish consulting & development

Power to the Editor!

Free eZ Training : http://www.VisionWT.com/training
eZ Future Podcast : http://www.VisionWT.com/eZ-Future

Friday 16 May 2003 2:09:01 am

Securing your EZsystem:
http://ez.no/manual/security/securing

What is Apache?
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_server

Apache HTTP Server Version 1.3
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/

Apache 1.3 Virtual Host documentation
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/vhosts/index.html

Apache 1.3 URL Rewriting Guide
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/rewriteguide.html

Apache HTTP Server Version 2.0
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/

MySQL Reference Manual
http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/index.html

PostgreSQL Official Documentation
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/

ImageMagick
http://www.imagemagick.org/
http://www.imagemagick.org/www/utilities.html

SVN
http://ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/documentation/ez_publish_3/howtos/getting_the_latest_ezpublish_source

SVN: Subversion: The Definitive Guide
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/book.html

SVN: Subversion FAQ
http://subversion.tigris.org/project_faq.html

HTML in german
http://selfhtml.teamone.de/

Unicode
http://www.unicode.org/
http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset.html

Character sets:
The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup
http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html

What is PHP:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP_programming_language

PHP:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/

PHP more Information:
http://www.php.net/links.php

PHP FAQ
http://www.alt-php-faq.org/
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/index.phtml/fid/51/

PHP safe_mode
http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.safe-mode.php

What is SMTP:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol

Greetings, ekke

http://www.coolscreen.de - Over 40 years of certified eZ Publish know-how: http://www.cjw-network.com
CJW Newsletter: http://projects.ez.no/cjw_newsletter - http://cjw-network.com/en/ez-publ...w-newsletter-multi-channel-marketing

Friday 16 May 2003 3:32:14 am

Hi Tony,

very good idea. What would you think if we widen this section to cover some ez publish topics as well and maybe add links to some of the more essential pages of the user/official docs. I think there is a lot of info in the docs but new users find it difficult to browse.

I started on a newbie tutorial a while ago but haven't had the time to get very far (http://ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/documentation/ez_publish_3/terminology_basics/ez_publish_3_for_newbies). I'd put that as a subdocument to your page.

Karsten

Friday 16 May 2003 4:23:31 am

http://ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/documentation/ez_publish_3/how_to_start_beginners

is for what you need before you start with ez and I think for the Server Requirement, chmod, etc.

http://www.coolscreen.de - Over 40 years of certified eZ Publish know-how: http://www.cjw-network.com
CJW Newsletter: http://projects.ez.no/cjw_newsletter - http://cjw-network.com/en/ez-publ...w-newsletter-multi-channel-marketing

Friday 16 May 2003 5:48:32 am

The glossary operator could be used for this, but needs to be extended so that an atribitray field can be specified which holds the string to search for and link. You wouldn't want to search for the entire title to match?

And a list of keywords (to be added to each user contributed doc) will be used to interlink docs in the future (guess this is for release 3.1 looking at the svn tree). Once this is done, we may extend the ezglossary operator to look for lists of keywords to match against where objects don't have this keyword list as attributes.

This will make it more powerful to interlink (and thus relate) objects automatically, yet in a controlled fashion.

Paul

eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training
http://twitter.com/paulborgermans

Saturday 17 May 2003 2:02:40 am

"ezpublish is a large app with plenty of dark corners to get lost in"

Yup. Plenty of places to get lost.

I've spent days trying to figure out how to find why "Demo" without its sample data won't show the Articles which I created inside a News folder. After changing the Demo template to know the ID of my new News folder...no children are found.

I finally found how to use attribute(show) to view some node info, and I see my News folder has no children. But there is some sort of Array with two things. I think the Articles I created inside the News folder are not children of the News folder. So maybe Article is not what I should have created.

But no sooner do I get that flash of illumination in the darkness than an eclipse occurs. My attempts to display what is in that Array fail, and then the Demo formatting vanishes and I see only the Standard pages so I can not continue with my testing and have to try to figure out what broke Demo. Maybe one of the settings/* "Debug" options will emit something comprehensible.