How many hours have you lost installing and testing ezpublish?

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Claudius Frank	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
Marco Zinn	Thursday 15 May 2003 11:06:57 am Well, I guess, you will get a lot of comments on this... and that's good. To answer your (provocative) question: When I think back, I'd say, that _i_ spent about 15 hours to get ezP 2.1 (or 2.0?) up and running, BUT - I had NO knowledge of Apache (or "virtual hosts", for that) - NO knowledge about MySQL - quite some knowledge about HTML (will not help you there) - some knowledge about databases in general - There was NO installer, so I downloaded apache, PHP, mySQL and ezP individually and installed them one by one. While I did this, i took notes and could re-produce this and install several ezP setups (on windows workstations, for testing). Later, I saw the need for such a docu and contributed a setup-guide for my setup, which was quite welcome here. I guess, your mail was to start a discussion about a good setup guide/documentation for ezP... and I agree, that there (still) is need for that. ezSystem and/or the community needs some (non-technical) writer, who writes a "simple" Documentation. The discussion about the term "virtual hosts" keeps comming up here every some weeks. My suggestion (hey ez ;) ) to do a documentation like that: 0. Write about, what ezP is, what it is NOT, and what it requires to set up (webserver, PHP, database...). Tell user, that they could contact local Resellers, if they are afraid of setting up a system themselfes ;) 1. What do you want to do with ezPublish (test locally or publish on a server)? Just locally --> go to step 4. 2. IF you want to use a server: What are you allowed to do on the webserver? Especially: Can you change the server configuration? Usually you cannot. If you don't know, how do you find out, if you can? 3. IF you can change server config, than you CAN use the "virtual hosts" setup. Explain, what that MEANS, explain the difference VH-Setup vs. non-Virtual-Host-Setup (advantages, disadvantages). Ask, if the user WANTS to use VH-Setup. If so, go on and explain the term (backup knowledge). 4. Write about the possible installs (installer, manually, setup-guide). ... My point: Most users will not have the option to setup ez with virtual hosts, as most web packages will not allow you to change the Rewrite Rules. THUS, you could skip the complete "Virtual Hosts" stuff for 90% of the readers. Marco http://www.hyperroad-design.com
George P.	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.
Jo Henrik Endrerud	Thursday 15 May 2003 1:23:16 pm Hi Claudius Virtual host is a web server term. Quickly explained does Apache use one virtual host for each domain it is serving. The first versions of eZ publish supported only virtual host setup, you needed one domain for admin and one for the user part (this could of course be sub-domains). This could be URL's like http://admin.ezpublish.no and http://www.ezpublish.no Thanks to a contribution by Kai Duebbert we now support setting up eZ publish in a sub-directory on the server without it's own domain name. This is called a non virtual host setup. This could be URL's like http://www.ezpublish.no/myinstallation/index.php/user and http://www.ezpublish.no/myinstallation/index.php/admin It doesn't matter if you are using Windows or Linux, the terms and possibilities are the same. To say everything quickly, if you have admin access on the server and your own domain you wish to use, you use the virtual host setup. Every other places you use the non virtual host setup. The matching is based on which setup you are using: -If you match on "host" you will only match on the host name. If is only possible on a virtual host setup. -If you are matching on "port" you also have virtual host but are using the same domain on all site accesses but use different ports to access the different site accesses (ex. www.ezpublish.no and www.ezpublish.no:8080) -For non virtual host setups you should match on "uri". This will make you separate your site accesses based on the complete uri (like in the example for non virtual hosts above) I hope this cleared up some of your questions. We are constantly working on improving the documentation and we are always happy for inputs on which parts we need to improve. Jo Henrik Endrerud \| System Developer @ Seeds Consulting \| http://www.seeds.no
Maggie Martin	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
Scot Wilcoxon	Thursday 15 May 2003 3:14:53 pm "Thanks to a contribution by Kai Duebbert we now support setting up eZ publish in a sub-directory on the server without it's own domain name. This is called a non virtual host setup. This could be URL's like http://www.ezpublish.no/myinstallation/index.php/user and http://www.ezpublish.no/myinstallation/index.php/admin" When you're setting this up, the "index.php" must be present so eZp can find the directory. Rewrite rules can not be used to omit index.php because the code looks for that string.
Jo Henrik Endrerud	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
Karsten Jennissen	Friday 16 May 2003 12:03:41 am Hi, I do have to say that I usually am the nice guy who tries to help everyone but I kind of have enough of these "You ez publish guys are all stupid because you cannot write proper documentation" posts. Last time I was dealing with one of those the guy even didn't know what a subdomain is. I mean please. eZ publish is an application framework, not a WYSIWYG system for absolute CMS newbies. eZ publish requires you to learn a completely new scripting language, i.e. the template language, to get anything decent done and if you don't know what a subdomain is you are probably in the wrong place. Having said that, the community is happy about suggestions to what is missing, but it is ALSO happy about contributions. eZ systems do NOT have to do the documentation thing, they know the system and they can make money by setting up sites for clients with it. That's what the user contributed docs for and I have spent more time that I have writing these. Needless to say that I write them slightly biased towards what I would find useful, just as all the other nice user who have contributed for free. Moreover, eZ publish 3 has only recently been released so the docs still need to be written. Contribute to the docs if you make any small step further with eZ publish and help them grow. Thank you. Karsten P.S.: When I started with eZ publish 2.2.3, it took me a few hours to set it up on a shared service. At that time, my PHP/ Server knowledge was almost non-existant.
Tony Wood	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
Tony Wood	Friday 16 May 2003 1:06:21 am I forgot and important link. A beginners guide to securing your system. Also I have to say I disagree with the title of this thread. No time was ever wasted learning new things, its the problems we face that define what we don't know and help us understand what we need to learn. 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
Ekkehard Dörre	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
Tony Wood	Friday 16 May 2003 2:37:38 am ekke, Thanks for this I have created a new section in User contributed doco http://ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/documentation/ez_publish_3/how_to_start_beginners Hopefully new users will add to this. Its a first hit and comments and changes should be made. 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
Karsten Jennissen	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
Tony Wood	Friday 16 May 2003 3:41:48 am Hey Karsten, Its a tough one, the current pages work well as they stand, I think a next steps which links the link you provided would be useful. If we include too much info in the beginner section, then we could end up destroying the structure of the whole contribution area. We are not well placed to decide anyway... we know to much about eZ to be objective. We can just make an educated guess and let new users give it form and direction. 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
Ekkehard Dörre	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
Tony Wood	Friday 16 May 2003 5:06:23 am I agree its a good start, and some chmod work etc needs to be done, i have written one of these at http://ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/documentation/ez_publish_3/howtos/permissions but it may not be on target for the audience. It seems what we need also is a auotmatic glossary, so when terms are mentioned in forums a link is created. I think Paul B wrote one of these, maybe eZ could implement it? 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
Paul Borgermans	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
Maggie Martin	Friday 16 May 2003 1:31:42 pm Thanks Jo! That was exactly what I was after ;-) And big thanks to you all for your help and links. Karsten that info for newbies is great! (of course I want more) Overall the documentation is very good. I only started struggling with it when it came to adjusting for non virtual host settings. ezpublish is a large app with plenty of dark corners to get lost in ;-) I figure any and all help for newbies to advanced geeks is useful and gets more folks using ezp!
Scot Wilcoxon	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.
Claudius Frank	Saturday 17 May 2003 3:10:00 am Hi Scot, I read your problem and I would suggest that you try to assign your new created class "News" to a section. If you are able to assign this class to a section which already exists, I suppose it will work. Regards Claudius