Time needed to grasp eZ Publish

Friday 01 January 2010 3:30:07 pm

Still struggling with my love/hate relationship with eZ Publish.

Love: I like the sound concepts and architecture of eZ Publish, its out-of-the box features, its flexibility, and its customization possibilities. And although one day I said I would never spend money on open source software, I bought the book "eZ Publish 4 Enterprise Web Sites Step by Step". Yes, finally a book about eZ Publish in British instead of Norwegian English, like the eZ Systems documentation. And only fools never change their mind. I can install an eZ Publish plain site, but didn't yet succeed to setup an eZ Publish webin, which always ends with an "Internal server error". When some day, I will succeed, I can use the book, as it starts from such an installation.

Hate: eZ Systems, which may be supposed to be able to setup a decent website with eZ Publish and should do so in its own interest, still didn't manage to do so with ez.no after so many years. The site is extremely slow, pages sometimes appear without CSS (a browser refresh is then required), and it isn't even XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant. Moreover, also after so many years, the documentation remains poor and uncomplete, probably with the intent to have users turn to their expensive services.

Now a question to eZ Publish admins who have a reasonably good knowledge about eZ Publish (the software is so complex, that I suppose nobody knows all about it).

eZ Publish is an enterprise level CMS and CMF, and in its document "eZ Publish Toru", eZ Systems praises eZ Publish as the system that is used by top media multi-nationals, medium-sized businesses, government agencies from the regional to the federal level, humanitarian organizations, and educational institutions.

On the other hand, according to the article about eZ Publish on en.wikipedia.org, eZ Publish covers a larger scope: "Typical applications range from personal homepages to a mulitlingual corporate website [...]".

Now I of course understand that eZ Publish, in terms of investment of time and effort to learn it, may not be the most appropriate choice to build the kind of homepage that you can find on some sites as "My first web page in 10 minutes".

I am a former IT professional (but not in the area of websites development). I have a reasonably good knowledge about XHTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I have my own VPS with openSUSE Linux 11.1, and am still studying the administration of it.

I am building as a hobby a personal application driven website, as well as websites for non profit organizations.

So my question is now: about how many hours should it take me to acquire sufficient knowledge about eZ Publish in order to be able to benefit from its features and advantages?

This is because, as websites development is a hobby for me, I can not afford to spend 40 hours a week on it.

So if you tell me that it took you 6 months at 40 hours a week, I will know that it will take me about 2 or 3 years, and therefore, it will be in my interest to first settle with a less sophisticated system, while continuing to study eZ Publish.

Thank you very much in advance for your advice.

Sunday 03 January 2010 2:03:35 pm

Direct answer to your question - 6 months, 20-30 hours a week, starting with about your stated qualifications. But I learned something in the process. That it need not be that difficult.

Just like you, I was fascinated by the promise. I had been looking for just a usable CMS solution. My definition of usable being something that could be administered in the future without a full time effort by a full time staff. Everything else I could find was simply too fragmented at the code level. Too many pieces to get to the whole.

eZ starts out with the "whole" and a whole lot more. I dare say better administration and management tools than any other open source web portal-CMS system. By a wide margin. Probably better than anything else you can purchase for any amount of money by a wide margin. But that is a different discussion.

About the third pass through CMS options, I "got it". I could see how eZ was the answer. Then I started trying to use it via the available tutorials and developer documentation. That is the wrong approach. Too time consuming, too much education that you will simply never use. Too many outdated references.

The way to learn to use and appreciate eZ is to install the latest version with demo content. Then set out to mold the demo content to your purpose. That way, you learn what you need to know, without getting lost in developer level docs. Take a user level approach, versus a developer level approach. Stay away from the tweaks and the customizations. Use it like you don't know anything about PHP, MySQL, CSS or any other acronym.

Although still a bit of a confusing morass for complete newbies, webportalmaster.com was my attempt to document the daily care and feeding of eZ Publish while molding it to my purpose. The best CMS system should be capable of best documenting how to use it within its own framework, agreed?

If the next complete newbie, you for instance, would create a similar treatise regarding your journey, or comment on my efforts, I believe eventually a USER LEVEL COMMUNITY could build a documentation set that would make sense to complete eZ newbies. That is the missing link, user level docs that eschew any developer level commentary.

Then eZ adoption can explode to MySQL proportions, greatly enhancing the usability of the web in general. It would make the world a better place by saving a lot of people a lot of time building inferior stop-gap solutions ;~}

Cheers!

Doug Brethower
Apple Certified Technical Consultant, Southwest, MO USA
http://share.ez.no/directory/companies/lakedata.net

Monday 11 January 2010 9:17:18 am

It also took me around 6 months to understand mostly.

I also love it because as a developer it allows me to create almost anything without touching anything on the DB side (although I could if needed).

One issue I've found is that if I start a project that gets popular, I will have some difficulty to make it develop by the community as not all developers have eZ knowledge and it will take them some times before being able to contribute properly.

Tuesday 02 February 2010 1:48:49 pm

First, I would like to thank all the contributors to this thread, besides myself, for their valuable input.

"Depending on how fast you can read that book "eZ Publish 4 Enterprise Web Sites Step by Step", you will be at 80-90% as for required knowledge to build your sites."
Robin Muilwijk
You know, Robin: that book is really not a novel. It's about studying hands on and focusses on the delivery of a standards-based enterprise website for a (virtual) magazine adopting eZ Publish for the first time.
For those who want to know the scope:

1. Installing eZ Publish.
2. Creating our site accesses.
3. Defining and creating content classes.
4. Creating content structure.
5. Creating an extension.
6. Template design.
7. Template content classes.
8. Adding community forums.
9. Internationalization and localization.
10. Creating roles and privileges.
11. Cache configuration.
12. Deployment.

Appendix A - APC tuning for eZ Publish.
Appendix B - Advanced debugging.
Appendix C - Best eZ Publish extensions.
So to work through it requires somewhat more time than to just read it...

"Direct answer to your question - 6 months, 20-30 hours a week, starting with about your stated qualifications."
Doug Brethower

Thank you for this concrete indication.
6 months = 26 weeks, and 26 weeks * 30 hours/week = 780 hours.
First conclusion: I will have to continue with TYPOlight for some time for production purposes, and, if, as a hobbyist, I want to master eZ Publish after 2 years, I will have to spend 7:30 hours a week on it.
Second conclusion: the above mentioned book must be far from complete, because, even if I would spend 1 hour per page, as it comprises 292 pages, it would take me only 292 hours.

"webportalmaster.com was my attempt to document the daily care and feeding of eZ Publish while molding it to my purpose."
Doug Brethower
I have looked at the site and have added it to my favourites about eZ Publish.

"I had just been using ez for few months when at first conference somebody told me it takes 6 months to mostly understand and he was right."
zurgutt
and
"It also took me around 6 months to understand mostly."
Quoc Huy Nguyen Dinh
Do you both mean you worked full-time (let us say 40 hours a week) during 6 months studying eZ Publish, which makes up for a total of 1040 hours?

"Last, but not least, eZ Publish leans on the side of enterprise-grade solutions, having one slightly problematic consequence on beginners, low-budget adoption: it has minimum requirements to run properly, and some VPS and other shared-hosting systems do not take it."
Can you imagine that there are non-profit organizations which, at least in terms of features, have the same requirements as large commercial companies?
There are few shared hosting systems on which one can run eZ Publish, and almost never under optimal conditions. Even if, for a site with few concurrent visitors and page views, the CPU, memory, and disk access resources would suffice, it is almost always impossible to correctly configure the system, as on most shared hosting systems, the user has no access to the php.ini file and to the shell.
However, in the meantime, I have succeeded to setup several eZ Publish installations (plain_site, webin with and without demo content, eZ Flow with and without demo content - what a good feeling when there are no more remarks left in the Fine Tuning screen of the Setup) on my 15 Euro a month VPS at Strato (Germany), and they all run very well. Of course, I will have to see how things go once a site goes into production and becomes visitors.
After all, today, even a cheap VPS offers more resources than a very expensive dedicated server 10 years ago.

"See you around the community, we'll help you spend less than 2 years mastering eZ Publish!"
Nicolas Pastorino
Thank you very much, Nicolas! So I can hope I will master eZ Publish at Christmas 2012... ;-)

Wednesday 03 February 2010 8:38:33 am

Jozef, yes I was working full time.

It took me around 6 months without book and without taking the training (took it later on), but using Google and with the help of other developers. At the beginning I was more developing work arounds using DB tables and PHP scripts in extensions, but then I progressively learn to master the template language.