Community improvements?

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Author	Message
Paul Forsyth	Monday 02 August 2004 5:38:10 am Its now August and the resources for making community improvements are meant to in place. Apart from the newsletters from Ole I see little in they way of improvements and little said about what will happen next with the site. The newsletters seem to have made the blog entries redundant so what will happen to that? I like the content of the newsletters but the bug list needs to be more refined. Instead I would suggest actually fix the numerous suggestions/enhancements that have been entered about the bug system and create a link to whats changed in the last week. You really need a way of voting for bugs and instead list what has changed with bugs that are important to the community and to companys. In addition why not list the bugs that directly affect the community and ez.no? Surely these are entirely relevant to improving the community? It shouldnt take too long to sift through the bug list to find them all... The spec area is a nice start and i hope it is developed. As a start can notifications be added to that area to allow better dialogue to occur? I am still hoping this is a serious attempt at kickstarting the community by eZ... paul -- http://www.visionwt.com
Ole Morten Halvorsen	Tuesday 03 August 2004 5:39:27 am Hi Paul, Due to vacation, some additional unexpected work and new ez.no servers I'm behind schedule. There's a lot of work needed to be done to the ez.no site, especially the community part. We are dead serious about improving the community and you will see alot of changes/improvements in the near future. Ole M. Senior Software Engineer - Vision with Technology http://www.visionwt.com http://www.omh.cc http://www.twitter.com/omh eZ Certified Developer http://ez.no/certification/verify/358441 http://ez.no/certification/verify/272578
Paul Forsyth	Wednesday 04 August 2004 6:35:46 am Ole and eZ crew, Im sure there will be changes. Its the when that concerns me. Through articles published here and at the eZ conference in June we were told this resource role would be 100% on ez.no by July. That clearly isnt the case and the reasons you listed show that it wont be for some time because other work areas will always intrude. Unless the community work is properly separated it will always be left to the end. Im also concerned at the present size of the community. Last month we were told of one million downloads for eZ. Impressive stats but how many active installations are there of the different versions? How does this figure translate? The stats page currently lists the community size at 15457 but last month there were only 145 posts. How does this comapare to previous months and is this number for only version 3 users? Are they increasing/decreasing? How does eZ staff activity relate to posts? I feel there is too much to do and too few people to do it. To go back to bugs. I've just spend an hour collating a few bug areas together. Here are lists I'll be watching for workflows and extensions, two current areas i'd like improvements on. This is an example of what i'd like to see in the newsletters, but probably more high level. http://www.visionwt.com/en/developers/ez_publish/bugs/extensions http://www.visionwt.com/en/developers/ez_publish/bugs/workflows They are at our site because its too hard to enter this information at ez.no. I'll post this to the forums. paul -- http://www.visionwt.com
Alex Jones	Wednesday 04 August 2004 8:36:06 am Paul's points reflect the views of many of us in the community. Several discussions of this issue have cropped up on the eZ IRC channel, and numerous threads on these forums. We need a staffer who is solely dedicated to the community. eZ publish is at an important stage of development and expansion. Personally, I worry that the lack of community attention from eZ systems will sabotage a great package and reduce the participation of this dedicated community. While several members of the community have volunteered to help out, one even going so far as to offer up video tutorials, the promised support from eZ systems is delayed time and again. While we understand the need to take care of your customer support contracts (especially those of us who have relied on them in the past, and expect to in the future), those needs should be addressed with resources separate from the community support person. From a business perspective, further delaying a dedicated community support staffer cuts at future revenues and growth. This person will help new users become familiar with the system, making them comfortable enough to choose it as their CMF. In time some of those users will need additional help requiring a support contract. Even those who do not need the support contract will be using eZ publish, expanding the community base and spreading word of the great system that it is. Community support is also extremely important for those of us who have installations of eZ publish, and are dedicated to the community. We need to know what is happening, and we need to know that our feedback is being heard. We spend a lot of time on the community, and working with eZ publish on our own sites, so the feedback we provide is extremely valuable. Suggestions, such as those Paul listed above may not be as important to you, but they have a major impact on those of us who rely on eZ publish. We need an advocate within eZ systems who can make this case for us. Please, follow up on the promise of community support soon. It is important. Alex Alex [ bald_technologist on the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net): #eZpublish ] <i>When in doubt, clear the cache.</i>
Tony Wood	Wednesday 04 August 2004 10:05:08 am I want to add my voice to this thread. It is a really important time for eZ publish at the moment, the product is maturing well and add-ons are starting to appear steadily. We really need a pro-active community environment to feed this growth. --tony http://www.visionwt.com 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	Wednesday 04 August 2004 1:10:49 pm Hi A few things I would like to add to the above: 1) the community is way too small and even more so in terms of developers who contribute. While the cited stats look impressive, I'm not impressed. One of the ez crew should definately show up here so the community base can grow to a level that it becomes self-sustainable. Compared to say 2 years ago, the core of active contributors is essentailly the same (some left, some joined the club). 2) the community should organise itself too a bit more. Given the discussions above and elsewhere, I consider to make a half-sleeping thing public: a show-case portal on pubsvn.ez.no where contributions are demonstrated and explained in detail, more than is possible now. 3) the "web publishing" business is taking the largest chunk in the ez community. I really felt quite lonely at the last conference (and surprised of being so) given the potential of ez publish as a CMF. On the other hand, this is consistent with the observed small developer community. Feature-wise, ez publish probably provides 95% of what people need in this area. Intranets with highly "collaborative" portals where every user is an editor (my area) are IMHO a gold mine for ez systems (and their partners). However, a lot needs to be done to unleash the potential of ez publish here. The flexible content model is the heart of such a system, but we need the legs, hands and eyes too (read: easy manipulation of data). A "push" by the ez crew by means of more direct community involvment is a key: provide the tools to make arms and legs. While this will attract some Dr Frankensteins, it will finally show the full potential of the ez brewery at Skien my 2 cents -paul eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training http://twitter.com/paulborgermans
Aleksander Farstad	Wednesday 04 August 2004 1:40:36 pm I just want to confirm what we have said before. Ole will spend 100 % of his time with eZ.no and eZ community. He did already start this in mid July as promised. The first weeks he has had to use part of his time on finishing up some customer support as we are on vacation time. We have also bought a new set of servers for eZ.no, which we will set up and he has been spending quite his time on, which is high priority so we have higher performance and reduced downtime. This is work he is doing to eZ.no, but yo do not notice. We have great plans with updating both the community section and other parts of eZ.no, and will implement lots of the requests and suggestions made. He will also be active in the forums. And we know the importance of the community Aleksander "the boss"
Paul Borgermans	Wednesday 04 August 2004 2:14:21 pm Ah the boss! Thanks for the update on your commitment Aleksander ;-) Regards -paul eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training http://twitter.com/paulborgermans
Edward Eliot	Wednesday 25 August 2004 4:48:14 am Hello, As a new user I found that the learning curve is very steep. There is no clear overview as to exactly how eZpublish works. The PDF tutorial helps but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. The documentation seems to be duplicated in a lot of areas with different answers to the same problem leaving the user unsure as to the correct way of implementing a certain feature. There is also little mention of which parts of the documentation refer to the various versions of eZpublish. I think an area which gives upfront details about system requirements would be useful. Examples of what kind of performance one can expect from certain hardware would help to reduce the amazing nmuber of questions about performance on the site. Also more mention should be made of caching, where it is most useful etc. I think things like the site design selection and toolbar setup in the admin interface add confusion to the learning process. Once I stopped worrying about those "token guesture" features and concentrated on building my own templates to do what I wanted it was much easier. I think a decent diagram showing the relationship between the various template files would be helpful and where certain variables like $module_result can be used. It is hard to know where to start initally when confronted with so many files. I think serious work should be done on the example sites. They don't demonstrate the system well enough and in my opinion pull in the type of users who expect to be able to understand everything and produce a fully featured site without any learning and minimal time investment. I think it would be nice to have fully featured articles on the site which explain how to solve common problems users might incounter. I am thinking along the line of the tutorials on Zend that go beyond documenting how features work and present a full solution to a particular problem. I am sure knowledgeable community members could be incouraged to write articles, particuarly with the incentive of say, a free copy of OE or a featured section about them and their business accompanying the article. I think it is great that Ole will be working full time on the site but I know from working on similar sized web sites this is a job for more than one person. Just some thoughts. Regards, Ed.