The eZ vision - Sharing, Open mind...

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Author	Message
K259	Wednesday 25 February 2004 6:29:48 am It would be of great help, interesting and a great learning factor to have an own tabulator on the www.ez.no site with information and code developed by the ez crew for customers, free for use and download by the community and other ez publish users. Not every company want to share their paid developed code done by the eZ crew, their partners or themselves, but a lot of us do, which I think can help a lot of others to make their site much better, they can save costs and get their company site faster up'n running. In this way, ppl and the community can take advantage of the already developed functionality which is adjusted for the actual company..and we can share each other code, templates and fixes which the ez crew have made for us (the companies) and got paid for. If we get portal-solutions, news-solutions, education-solutions etc., I'm sure a lot of ppl can take a great advantage from these example-sites, if we share and contribute in this way. That would make the eZ vision a reality and make eZ going stronger in the market! I would urge administrator and others to do this..when the eZ crew put up a tab for this on www.ez.no. Maybe eZ also can contribute with their code behind www.ez.no..templates and so on ;) Best regards
Alex Jones	Wednesday 25 February 2004 6:44:12 am Zinistry, I believe that is what the Contributions area is meant for: http://ez.no/community/contributions Alex Alex [ bald_technologist on the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net): #eZpublish ] <i>When in doubt, clear the cache.</i>
Aleksander Farstad	Wednesday 25 February 2004 7:06:26 am Dear community, We at eZ systems believe that by being open and sharing information we can accomplish great things. We have a three point strategy for developing eZ publish; 1. Work with the open source community for product development, distribution and testing 2: Work with paying cusotmers for product development, referances and testing 3: Mass distribution of standardized solutions and functionality (Based on the experience and knowledge from the above processes, we seek to standardize functionality and distribute it to everybody to help you all achieve more.) But we are going to do this through the standard packages of the eZ publish CMS, which the 3.3 version show the first small step. These packages will display standardized functionality out of the box. There would probably also be more packages in the future as this develops. But we do not want to release our customer projects, mainly for two reasons. The first is that not all customers want this, the second is that we want to be able to support and fix bugs for what we release, if we where to release "unofficial" releases of solutions with eZ publish, we would not be able to provide the wanted support. Most customer work is mainly customized to certain customers needs, but we continually try to see if there are functionlaity that can be generalized and put into eZ publish and thus share the results. So to conclude, we want to share what we learn that can be a gain to the developers of eZ publish. But we want to do this in an organized way sharing standardized solutions that we will support and further develop. Our main goal is to make everybody achieve more. Aleksander
K259	Wednesday 25 February 2004 7:31:16 am I agree Alex Jones, but I think this can be pretty messy. Would be great to make these doc. more organized which Aleksander F. writes :) And I also know that many customers don't want this, but we(our company) have been contacted by a lot of other companies which want to use eZ publish, but they want to save costs and are interesting in sharing code, templates etc..and of course knowledge. I've supported them with different things(code, templates etc.) and they've also got something developed by eZ which we(our company) got back from them...so I really see a very need for a community for the companies which can trade these kind of information, code etc., so we can help each other to save costs. And when a bug is fixed on a site, then we have very good contact with our "traders/friends/colleges", so we can give them information on which bugs they need to fix, and how they can fix it (and: eZ then need to fix the bug for just one company and we do the rest ;) ). Just a suggestion, so not up to me to decide :) But, I think it would help a lot of companies with a low web-budget :) I'm willing to share, and I believe this is a great way to develop the ez-community.
Alex Jones	Thursday 26 February 2004 7:36:23 am Zinistry, I guess I don't understand what you would like to see and how it differs from the Contributions section and this forum. Do you feel that the contributions just need to be re-organized and that section given more prominence? I do like the idea of more involvement and trading of ideas and information, I'm just not sure what you are speaking of. Alex Alex [ bald_technologist on the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net): #eZpublish ] <i>When in doubt, clear the cache.</i>
K259	Thursday 26 February 2004 4:24:02 pm Hi Alex! My goal: to get more complete contributions..not only code, but also good documented stuff with e.g. screenshots etc. Well, I guess you've right about that we can use the Contribution area :) Just wanted to encourage ppl who have developed stuff by themselves or eZ have developed stuff for them, to document and contribute with these things in a complete way, not just upload a little functionality here and there, but give the community a complete "modul" ready to implement and use(code, templates and documented information about the idea, functionality, use, usermanuals.. and maybe screenshots also) ;) That would be great! For example complete doc. on portals, galleries, webshops, archive, member-search(with syncronization from other database-systems), e-learning modules(for those who got this developed), news sites, intranet-sites etc. The ez-demo sites are ok, but very very simple. If you check out other CMS-systems(also Open Source), they have more available functionality in their demo sites. I've checked out a lot of other CMS, and here you can get a complete and "ready to use" tree menu integrated without having to install extensions(you just have to do a change in the admin-interface and the tree menu is there), classes which have the possibillities to have an unpublish/publish function(without creating cron-jobs etc.)(e.g. Digimaker which already have these attributes set from the beginning), upload templates through the admin interface without having to login to a linux shell: copy templates and give the right accesslevels on the files(Mambo) and make changes in override.ini.., automatic archiving functions ready to set up without having to set up cronjobs and access the server(e.g. Digimaker). I know the possibillites are in eZ publish, but to get this up and running in eZ, you have to do too many things. If you "buy", or download a complete Open Source CMS from other companies, many of these have a lot more func. available without having to do anything else than graphically using the admin interface. So, the clue is..if functionality and templates already exists, then we have to get access to it..we need a more Open minded and sharing community than today..we need to get eZ publish to the users, not that every user have to dig into ez publish to invent the things again and again paying someone to do the job time after time or use to many resource from their own company to re-invent the weel. I know eZ publish is free, but when the demo comes with such little functionallity as today(and that's the fact), then we have to pay for developing our sites if we need functionality already existing(which is not available on www.ez.no)..the costs of the final eZ publish site will then be just as high as if we bought a site from another cms-company which is charging for their system, but these systems have more available functionality. So, I see no saving costs using eZ publish if we don't get access to good already developed functionality. If something is developed, everyone should be able to get access to it (if the paying companies want to share). The clue is to develop everything only once if the code, templates etc. are good and secure. I like the flexibillity in eZ, and I'm really looking forward to get a more contributing community...am also really looking forward to the next release of eZ publish with a better GUI and a a more user friendly structure-navigation. Hope that answered your question Alex.
Alex Jones	Friday 27 February 2004 6:31:54 am Zinistry, that did clear it up for me, thank you. I agree whole-heartedly that we, as a community should share as much as possible, and more than we currently are. I think that many of us are trading information, code and general ideas amongst small groups. Expanding those groups to include the larger community is important, and I will do my best to provide more information and code where and when I can. Perhaps we should lay out a detailed framework of what is most needed for the community. You have already mentioned some very important pieces, but I think it would be good to ask everyone in the community as to what they are looking for. Then, if we have a good list to work off of, those developers, like us, who have created solutions to those issues can post them for everyone. I would also recommend that we post a basic set of guidelines and requests as to what to include with this information, again, much like you mentioned. I will post the request for module ideas in the <i>General</i> forum to get the ball rolling. Alex [ Edited ] -------------------------------------------------- I have started that thread at http://ez.no/community/forum/general/what_modules_do_you_want_to_see Alex [ bald_technologist on the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net): #eZpublish ] <i>When in doubt, clear the cache.</i>