Thursday 03 March 2005 1:53:10 pm
Hi, Having just succesffuly completed a fairly major implementation of ezpublish for a corporate intranet, I would like to share my thoughts/suggestions on what I feel are the most important things to improve on. Firstly - ezpublish definetly met our needs and after a fairly steep learning curve weve managed to implement everything we wanted. I like ezpublish a lot. Secondly - it appears that a high number of users are using ezpublish for internet websites and that some of the things Ive hit are unlikely to be issues for internet sites (vs intranet with many content owners). We also had to go with version 3.4.4 due to the stage of development we were in when 3.5 was released.
Suggestions:
1. Permission system.
In a typical intranet you often want to allow access to all content but you may restrict a number of different areas which should be only for different subsets of people. You also set up a large number of content owners to manage different content in different areas. Setting this up in ezpublish can be done but can become overly complex due a bug posted (and apparently not resolved yet).
http://ez.no/community/bugs/policy_user_section_access_problem Also sections dont overlap, so when we create sections for content owners, we have to add these sections in to a list of the sections that standard can read. We ended up with 70 odd sections and 20 roles which are over complicated but necesary for what we needed. We also created copies of the article, file and folder classes which we pre-pended the names of with "restricted" in order to give us more control of what people could/couldnt see.
A potential part solution for this is allow the nesting of sections (as per groups) and be able to set extra permissions on a section, which either are in addition to the parent section or override the parent section. I believe you would need both and the choice of chosing what you are doing (add/override) per section.
2. Fetching The inability to do a fetch with a combination of "and" and "or" made some of the logic for our apps very complicated, we were able to get around this by being inventive but things would have been so much easier if we hadnt had to deal with this.
3. Documentation
Ive come a long way in my ezpublish knowledge since starting this project but even with the book, the online documentation and the mostly very good community support, its a hard road to climb - especially learning the template language. The documentation I know is continuing to improve which is great. Next up - hopefully seeing the bug fix and then upgrading to the next version of ezpublish. Onwards an Upwards. Arran
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