eZ Components templating engine?

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Author	Message
Jani Tarvainen	Wednesday 17 June 2009 9:38:04 pm In eZ Publish a lot of the functionality is built on template level (fetches, looping the results, etc.). The current templating language is quite stable, but the syntax is anything but clear - that is what know and keep hearing from developers time and time again. The plan has probably been to switch to using eZ Compontents templating ( http://ezcomponents.org/docs/tutorials/Template ). I recall it was even in the road map (around a year ago for 4.0.x). I know changing the templating engine is a huge undertaking - making sure fetches, cache-blocks, etc, etc. work as intended. And as the default designs and extensions (including the admin interface) are built using the current engine it is probably not possible to get rid of it overnight. What is the plan with this, guys? I will not be attending the conference in Paris, but I would like to take this matter up for discussion. Especially now that the roadmap indicates that there will be a new design for the admin interface. -- http://ezpublish.fi/
Jérôme Vieilledent	Saturday 27 June 2009 3:03:43 am Hi Jani I discussed this subject with Bertrand Dunogier from eZ Systems during the conference and he told me that this was in the pipe. They even have a working 4.x eZ Publish prototype working with the eZ Components template engine. Paul Borgermans told us that important choices will be made during fall about Project V (future eZ Publish 5).
Bertrand Dunogier	Saturday 27 June 2009 3:59:51 am I have to add something about the prototype part. We have something working, but integration "as-is" will unfortunately be impossible, as this feature would have a large impact on the existing codebase. We are currently working hard on planning what the "final" next step will be for eZ publish, and now is definitely the worst possible time to integrate such large features if we don't want to do the same work twice ;) Bertrand Dunogier eZ Systems Engineering, Lyon http://twitter.com/bdunogier http://gplus.to/BertrandDunogier
Jani Tarvainen	Saturday 27 June 2009 6:34:31 am First of all it's great to hear that this has been discussed. And as I expected it is a known issue and I do realise the efforts it would take to implement this into version 4.x. From where I stand I think eZ Publish 4 was not a great leap architecture wise - it was more or less a necessity to get eZ Publish to run on PHP 5. For the mysterious project V I'm sure it'll be a total rewrite as the eZ Components team is busy building MVC tools, etc. As eZ Publish 5 seems to be all about rewriting the whole application it will be a major task considering the feature list eZ has acquired in the ten years of development. While the eZc team has done a lot of groundwork for this, being a realist I realise this product is still years, not months away from complete. Resources are ALWAYS limited, so eZ Systems need to strike a balance between developing the current version and the next generation of the product. Adding the fact that you provide commercial support means even more resource constraints. A "normal" open source project can just ditch the legacy version development and concentrate on the latest and greatest. If I were to decide I would not spend resources on developing a new admin interface (with the current templating system) for 4.x. as the current version is just fine from my point of view. -- http://ezpublish.fi/
Bertrand Dunogier	Saturday 27 June 2009 4:38:23 pm It's great to get complete and useful feedback about the CMS' evolution. Things are about as complex as you describe ;) It is true that eZP4 was not a technological leap. Choosing to develop the current product & reimplement features for good is always hard, but it's not like we have a real choice here. Regarding the admin interface, the template integration part is not imho the most part of what there is to develop. Designing a modern interface with great ergonomy & flexibility is gonna be much more difficult, and following architectural changes doesn't mean we'll have to start everything from scratch. Bertrand Dunogier eZ Systems Engineering, Lyon http://twitter.com/bdunogier http://gplus.to/BertrandDunogier
Jani Tarvainen	Sunday 28 June 2009 12:31:26 am <i>Regarding the admin interface, the template integration part is not imho the most part of what there is to develop. Designing a modern interface with great ergonomy & flexibility is gonna be much more difficult, and following architectural changes doesn't mean we'll have to start everything from scratch.</i> This is very much true! As the plan is probably to keep the basic concept the same. Having content objects (built out of attributes) attached to a tree of nodes is still very good and clear to me. There are drawbacks with the model (and the generated SQL) - for example attribute filtering/sorting is slow and modifying content classes with large amounts of content objects is a pain. Still you've got a good thing going on and you do have a lot of features (like XML content with embeds, etc.) that you just don't have in any other (PHP) CMS. Keep up the good work! -- http://ezpublish.fi/