eZ Components templating engine?

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).

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.

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http://ezpublish.fi/

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!

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http://ezpublish.fi/