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Friday 29 August 2003 8:18:58 am
After many hours of looking at the 2.2.9, the 3.1, and the 3.2 beta 1 versions, I must say kudos to ez publish. I am a 3yr developer and 9yr net admin in the service provider industry. So basically I have been providing solutions to clients needs for over 9 years. Durring this time I have always looked for CMS solutions that make my life easier and that give the client the best bang for the buck. So in short I wanted to give a short brief on what I think the product has to offer, it's short commings and where I stand in offering it as a solution to clients. Hopefully I can keep some of you from headaches and offer some suggestions that would move the product into something that just takes off. I started looking at version 3.1, out of frustration went to look at 2.2.9, and this morning I installed the 3.2 beta 1 product. My first impression of the product was awesome! The 3.1 version has a great codebase and offers great functionality. I installed it via the windows install scripts. It worked great but I found layout a bit confusing, the templates that were installed with the product made things even more confusing. But after a huge learning curve I decided it could work and installed it on linux. Basically it was very hard to install. Being a windows guru and a linux want-a-be I had to work through a learning curve. As far as installs go, ezpublish is not easy to install! Well because I needed to show a client a solution and was running out of time I installed version 2.2.9. After the install layout seems to be easier, design and development is much more straight forward. But after setting up the solution I found 2.2.9 to be clumbsy... There were some bugs I had to work through, the template/module/sections stuff is messy. It offers a great foundation to build somethign but adding functionality is hard and it is a bit buggy. Future additions of sections, scripts, etc, is much harder than with 3.1. 3.1 gives the developer and the user much more freedom to add functionality. Now after installing 3.2 beta 1 I finally understand. The new install scripts and the templates are awesome. rather than making things really confusing the templates seam to greatly ease the learning curve. I am going to rebuild one of my sites using this product. Some items that would make the product above all others. 1. Content sensitive help for developers and users. One great frustration is not being able to find help for specific areas of the product. Although it is usual there I found finding the solution took hours of searching through documentation. The user really should be able to click for help and be taken to something directly associated to that article. Rather than creating huge docs I think a knowledgebase would be much more appropriate. On teh dev side I have found on php.net the user comments to be more helpfull than anything. If I look up a functions syntax on the php site I can view comments/suggestions below. many times those suggestions/comments teach me immeasuribly more info about the function then the actual documentation. Another example of this is what Zope does with their inline commenting solution. 2. Ecommerce - I have read that the merchant and shipping modules such as paypal and authorize.net are left up to third party developers. The problem with this is that those that develop them don't necessarily want to share them. And the ones that need them are not savy enough to build them. I believe that if they were provided ez publish would take off as an ecommerce solution. there is a great shopping cart frontend but unfortunatly not much is offered for checkout. That is the reson why I believe that OS-Commerce has taken off so well. Although it is not a CMS we can learn alot from it. It installs with the most popular modules installed. Well I want to personally thank all the developers that contribute to ezpublish! Thanks! Well there is my two cents and my congrats! We have something great - but it can be greater!
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