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Wednesday 01 July 2009 4:15:09 pm
As a newbie to eZ Publish, I am continuing to spend many hours to learn eZ Publish. In fact, it's not really about learning, but rahter about trying to solve a giant puzzle, by the lack of any good documentation to learn the complex system that eZ Publish is. Many consider TYPO3 to be "the" enterprise level CMS. It's not. It's almost a secret that it is eZ Publish. If eZ Publish wasn't that, always nobody would spend so much time to find out how it works. Without good documentation, even a good software doesn't go a long way. I am sure that, more than with many other content management systems, with eZ Publish, a lot of people try to start out with it, then abandon it, only due to the lack of good documentation about how to use the system. This may be individuals wanting to publish a private home page, as well as big multinationals. The current version is 4.1.3, but the latest available manuals are about version 4.0. And even in the technical manual about version 4.0, in the reference chapter, many items are marked as "not yet been completed". This is sad, because for many people, this indicates an amateuristic approach, as it is the case with so many other "free" open source softwares. It's the mentality of "it's free, so take it as it is, or leave it". In the existing technical and user manual, one cannot find any spelling error. Apparently, the authors used a spelling checker. However, the structure, as well as the expressions in English, are so bad, that one has to transform it to something meaningful. There is not one online manual which explains how to create an eZ Publish website from scracth. Yes, reference is made to a tutorial in the old /documentation/ section. Then, when you try for instance to download the background for the TSCM website, you get the message "object not available". All this makes really a very poor impression. I am convinced that developers at eZ Systems are very professional people, but the marketing responsibles definitely have missed some lessons while acquiring their degree. So please, people of the eZ crew: don't take the lack of useful and good documentation to learn eZ Publish as a minor issue, because in fact, it'a a major issue. You would have very more users of eZ Publish if you had good documentation about it. I write you this, but I'm sure many others don't write it to you, but thinks the same, and just drop eZ Publish for these reasons.
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