smalltalk: what is CMS / list of cms / my 2 cents

Tuesday 07 July 2009 8:13:07 am

@ Christian:

I share your viewpoints about eZ Publish.

As opposed to many other content management systems, I see eZ Publish as having a solid foundation for content management, with an excellent websites content management system on top of it.

eZ Publish is one of the few content management systems which achieves a full separation between content and design, because no HTML is stored in the database, only crystal clear XML.

This not only allows for easy output in various formats, but also for easy integration with other applications.

It is the reason why at

http://www.coolscreen.de/portfolio/ecms_anwendungen/ecms_ez_publish/typo3_ez_publish

they state that eZ Publish plays in another ligue than TYPO3.

Some content magagement systems offer no content structure at all, others offer a very rigid structure. eZ Publish offers an automated, yet very flexible solution.

Tuesday 07 July 2009 3:24:42 pm

@ Cori:

I wouldn't call eZ Publish a complicated system, rather a sophisticated system, which inherently has some complexity, requiring a corresponding time investment for education.

eZ Publish has a sound architecture, opening the way for whatever development you will need in the future. It has the advantage of, besides as open source, also being distributed with commercial licences who are expensive enough to not allow for the delivery of bad quality. It has so many features out of the box, instead of having to implement often poorly written extensions by amateurs, as it is the case for so many other content management systems. In short, once you start using eZ Publish, you know you will never again have to convert to another CMS.

I don't feel that the community would be unfriendly or unforgiving. On the contrary, members of the eZ crew, as well as other community members, do everything they can to help us here.

I have worked for many years as a first line manager at the IT department of a large bank.

I have provided support on the phone and in person. As opposed to a forum, this way of providing support offered the advantage that I could first quickly ask a few questions in order to be aware of the knowledge level of the user. Yet even then, I sometimes made a wrong assumption. If I had estimated the previous knowledge of the user to high, he told me that he didn't understand my explanations, so I knew that I had to start off from a lower level. If I had estimated the previous knowledge of the user to low, he told me that I should not consider him as a newbie, so I knew I could talk with him on a higher level.

I have worked with developers. They like development. But they dislike testing. Having them write documentation was near to impossible. And having them right pedagogical documentation was almost always impossible.

In many postings on this forum, people complain about the lack of any good documentation to learn eZ Publish. The eZ Systems crew is not unfriendly, they are open for criticism, and they answer in a friendly way to it. They are aware of this problem, and they admit it. And they are really working on it. They have recently hired a doc writer, but of course, the guy will need some time before he can publish the results of his efforts. And around October, a new book about eZ Publish will be published. So the future is bright.

If, because of the steep learning curve and the current lack of good documentation to learn eZ Publish, you want to drop the diamond you state eZ Publish is, then please be honest, and don't compare it to midrange content management systems like Joomla and Wordpress.

If so, be honest, and compare eZ Publish with the other CMS which is considered as an enterprise level CMS: TYPO3.

This system offers you a quick tutorial in its version 3.8 (whereas the current stable version is 4.2.8), but you will need Internet Explorer 6.0 (no later version), otherwise the richt text editor will not work.

Crawl through the documentation written by Kasper, a rahter excentric personality, to find out about the template language, which is only a configuration language, as opposed to the full fledged template programming language of eZ Publish.

Don't look for any way to structure data content objects, as you will have to do this yourself.

Use extensions for whatever functionality you need. They are mostly in alpha or beta stage, or if you are lucky, in a 0.x version, and their quality is extremely heterogeneous.

At the end, you will still have a system storing html in the database, instead of clear XML, like eZ Publish, And you will still have a system which, as opposed to eZ Publish, will require very much time to learn the editors about how to work with it.

And last but not least: realize that TYPO3 versions 5.x will make a complete break with previous versions. This is what happens to software which has not a sound foundation like eZ Publish, but which, over time, due to a clear vision from the start, has become a spaghetti.

Wednesday 08 July 2009 1:35:05 am

Good morning,

wow, what have i done? Simply writing frustrations off my soul started a nice thread.
Thanks for sharing your opinions!

First: calm down. Be nice, we are all in the same boat :)

Let's point it out:
- ezPublish is not (often) covered in cms-shootouts
- ezPublish is ass-kicking great (separation content/layout - xml based)
- documentation is somehow weak
- beginners have to walk a tough road
- support by community members is highlevel, it-dedicated, not beginner orientated
- typo plays in some leagues below than ezpublish (this is good!)
- things mentioned above make ezPublish look awesome and complicated, thus it's not really suited for the web-blog-folks out there with their 'one-click-installation' and 'shiny surface but crappy core' systems...

I have to agree with all your points. The most significant <i>problem</i> (for me too) was to get a good starting point and documentation of how to get things done - in a noobish way.

This was - and is still a significant problem with eZPublish. On the one hand there is a good set of documentation available, on the other hand most of it is simply outdated (refers to 3.x) or covers not all aspects of what can be done. The best tips I found where in comments for the 3.x docs.

A lot of you have become partners but do not often share what you know in SIMPLE terms.

Second that. We live in a tough world, some fight to survive (financially), so getting the work done has highest priority. Supporting newbies in a nice/easy way here is coming too short. Shame on me too (sometimes). Perhaps a dedicated 'beginners' section has to be introduced. Explanations for beginners are very time-consuming and are also very detailed. And this takes time to write. As stated we really don't have the time so we're answering in a harsh way like 'rtfm' or 'activate the extension in the override' ... but it is not meant to be harsh.

The eZ Systems crew is not unfriendly, they are open for criticism, and they answer in a friendly way to it.

Second that too. Whenever i had contact with ez(system)crew, there was a warm, friendly and very professional atmosphere. Professional enough to frighten away beginners ?!? Perhaps, somehow, sometimes ...

Let me state something. I never wanted to compare ez to joomla. I was only very disappointed by a lot articles written by 3rd party's stating <CMS NAME HERE> is a 'promising' cms - and ez is never mentioned.
Of course there are 'enterprise cms', 'web cms' and things that don't deserve the name cms at all. But comparing apples and bananas doesn't make sense.
But those articles will make it into the it-department where a noobish guy reads the cms-shootout with some nice graphics, screenshots and investment-graphs. So he/she decides to use <CMS NAME HERE> as their business-orientated platform. This will fail and they never ever heard of ezPublish. Sad.

The team developing EZ publish more than has their hands full.

Yep, correct. Getting Project V done :-)
So it's more on us to spread the word on ezPublish, improve documentation, help noobs to get their system up and running. Let's create a dedicated beginners section. Let's write good, detailed, up-to-date beginner howto's. Let's set up more non-commercial sites using ezPublish, link to each other to gain a significant value in search engines when it-decision-makers are searching for 'cms'...

Thanks for this great discussion. I enjoyed your thoughts. Perhaps this will turn in results soon.

Chris

Hannover, Germany
eZ-Certified http://auth.ez.no/certification/verify/395613

Wednesday 08 July 2009 1:32:56 pm

Cori Roberts wrote:
"Regular Joe does not know what shell access is
...
Not tell people, hey if you don't like it there's the door."

Suppose after some weeks, regular Joe has managed to surf to another website than MSN with the Internet Explorer that came with his brand new PC. Now he has a big project: "My first family home page in 10 minutes". He comes here to ask where he can find the "shell access" in its Windows Vista Home edition, as he doesn't find it between the games. And if his posting is not answered after 10 minutes, he posts a second message with "Nobody?" as content.

I will not tell him where the door is. I will kindly post a link to one of the many websites about Unix for dummies.

And I will tell him that, right now, eZ Publish may be somewhat sophisticated for his project, and requires somewhat more time and effort to get familiar with than Notepad.

But to me, this does not seem to be the place where we should explain what a keyboard, a display screen, a file, a directory, or a shell is.

It's the same as when regular Joe asks his butcher for a knive to cut the meat the butcher sells: the butcher will also send him to another store.

Thursday 09 July 2009 2:08:53 am

Jozef:
I don't think Cori talked about the Joe's in that sense, but somewhat technical people that would like to set-up a small web page.

Yes, eZ Publish might not be suitable from them, and we should maybe add an what is eZ Publish and what knowledge is required from you to take full advantage of it?

And yes, we do have an job to do when it comes to:
1. update the documentation for 4.0 to include new stuff in 4.1 and other undocumented stuff
2. Write an ultimate getting started guide for 4.x , maybe two versions of it, one for developers (could be based on the one from the old doc page) and one for regular technical users on how to get started creating content with the solution as is out of the box.
3. Continuously improve api documentation (already being done, but this will be incremental)

As for #2, I would also like to propose or challenge you all to be part of that, I think it is a good idea that the community who look at our product with different eyes then us is part of this. And is able to collaborate on it.

So head over to http://projects.ez.no/doc all of you.. :)

eZ Online Editor 5: http://projects.ez.no/ezoe || eZJSCore (Ajax): http://projects.ez.no/ezjscore || eZ Publish EE http://ez.no/eZPublish/eZ-Publish-Enterprise-Subscription
@: http://twitter.com/andrerom

Thursday 09 July 2009 2:42:13 am

kracker:

http://projects.ez.no/doc is not a doc page, but a project to coordinate those that want to contribute to / discuss the various doc pages (ezpedia, ez.no/doc, articles, and future FAQ section).
Last time I checked, ezpedia did not have anything for that.

When it comes to the aesthetics of the ezpedia, the only thing I personally miss is a (categorization) structure so one can browse the pages there, in cases your not sure not sure what to search for or just want to see if there is something you want to learn or read up on.

I'll stop hijacking this thread now, if someone wants to discuss http://projects.ez.no/doc , do it on the project page's forum ;)

eZ Online Editor 5: http://projects.ez.no/ezoe || eZJSCore (Ajax): http://projects.ez.no/ezjscore || eZ Publish EE http://ez.no/eZPublish/eZ-Publish-Enterprise-Subscription
@: http://twitter.com/andrerom

Thursday 09 July 2009 8:44:59 am

When I saw Symphony CMS, I thought they were wrong, as SymFony is a framework first. But then I saw that they really created a CMS called SymPHony... I wonder why they chose that name... My 2 cents.

http://www.acidre.com

Thursday 09 July 2009 3:47:36 pm

@ Bård:

Thank you for the challenge. I have taken some time to think about it.

Firstly, it's a chicken and egg problem.

At present, I don't know enough about eZ Publish in order to write a getting started guide, as this is exactly what I need now.

I am taking notes for myself.

Notes with a clearer structure than the technical manual, and somewhat more British than Norwegian English, which are easier to lookup something.

Logging the problems I encounter, the solutions I have found, where I have found them, the questions I remain with (as I already said, the technical manual is not suited to learn eZ Publish, it's a big puzzle to solve).

Secondly, if you go to the opera, not many people are singing there, most are listening. I have to admit that, at present, with eZ Publish, I have a tendency to rather belong to the latter. Which doesn't mean that, once I am sure that I know eZ Publish sufficiently to be able to give correct advise on it, I will not help newcomers on this forum.