eZPublishForums.com: Help needed from the eZ Publish community!

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Author	Message
Jonathan Dillon-Hayes	Tuesday 08 February 2005 2:16:25 am Hello there: After talking it over with my eZ Publish peers, I've resolved that we need to have an outside community. This isn't to detract from these awesome forums that eZ Systems provides, but rather, to help grow the community, and provide a completely user-driven peer-to-peer experience. If I'm offtrack, I'm open to hearing it, but I don't think I am. I've seen a lot of folks asking if there are other communities besides this one, especially in the Americas, but there really aren't. Besides a really great effort by Graham Brookings with eZCommunity.net and the eZ 2.x fork, I have not seen a really good user community out there that's really focused on building up around eZ. That said, I'm looking for a few people to help me build out the site: eZPublishForums.com. I need moderators, and folks with a good idea of how to run an online community site for eZ Publish. I've installed vBulletin, and created some of the basic forum categories that make sense to me, but we still need to: - Skin the forums so that they look right - Notify the eZ Partners so that they can start posting their announcements and set them up with "partner level" accounts - Integrate the site with eZ System's announcements (I've already written to Aleksander about how to do this) I'd really like to build a core team who can help provide that core community we can build on. The goal here is to embrace and extend the eZ Publish community, using the forums as a mailing list archive for eZ mailing lists, etc. I need your help to make this happen. Let me know if you can be of assistance. Jonathan Dillon j (at) firebright.com PS. This is not a corporate "thing". I'm trying to build an better community, not promote the company. We're open to working with other eZ Partners (and in fact would really LOVE to). --------- FireBright provides advanced eZ deployment with root access http://www.FireBright.com/
Łukasz Serwatka	Tuesday 08 February 2005 2:26:16 am Hi Jonathan, I think that you should install Invision Power Board if you want to use forum. It`s more powerful then vBulletin and It`s very good for large forums. It`s hard to setup but If you configure it propperly works great. This is small sugestion at the beginning. Personal website -> http://serwatka.net Blog (about eZ Publish) -> http://serwatka.net/blog
Jonathan Dillon-Hayes	Tuesday 08 February 2005 2:30:55 am Thanks for the suggestion! I'm not a fan myself of IPB as I've seen it crap out under two high-traffic forum sites client's run (both were attachment heavy), but it's something we can consider if enough people want it. It's a solid product with a good code base though. Out of curiousity Lukasz, what makes you like IPB so much more? One of the features that sold me on VB is the ability to use it as an email archive, since I'd like to set up several peer-to-peer mailing lists. Jonathan --------- FireBright provides advanced eZ deployment with root access http://www.FireBright.com/
Łukasz Serwatka	Tuesday 08 February 2005 2:48:27 am Here you can find very large forum build with IBP http://forum.php.pl/ Look ath the statistics. IBP is full OOP writen application, is very stable, we haven`t any problems with this forum and is very fast I think. Very powerfull administration panel. We successful migrated from phpbb to IBP in last year. Now we are going to make update to 2.0 version and integrate this forum with eZ publish CMS. Personal website -> http://serwatka.net Blog (about eZ Publish) -> http://serwatka.net/blog
Jonathan Dillon-Hayes	Tuesday 08 February 2005 2:50:19 am That's a good size forum. I'll take a look. It's too late to get a refund, but I can give the license away to one of our non-profits if it's worth the switch. It all kind of depends on whether there is any interest in getting a community started. eZ has officially given us the nod, but I'm not going to try to do this alone. ;-) Jonathan --------- FireBright provides advanced eZ deployment with root access http://www.FireBright.com/
Łukasz Serwatka	Tuesday 08 February 2005 2:56:29 am Good forum is basis. This will be a primary communication channel for eZ community users. Community grows everyday ... Personal website -> http://serwatka.net Blog (about eZ Publish) -> http://serwatka.net/blog
Björn Dieding@xrow.de	Tuesday 08 February 2005 4:30:45 am >I'm trying to build an better community So what do you do different? Currently I find all the info I need at ez.no. Looking for a new job? http://www.xrow.com/xrow-GmbH/Jobs Looking for hosting? http://hostingezpublish.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- GMT +01:00 Hannover, Germany Web: http://www.xrow.com/
Jonathan Dillon	Tuesday 08 February 2005 11:09:38 am Wow - I'm really suprised by the lack of response to this thread. There is an astounding amount that can be done differently, with great positive effect. Some of the things that would be better right off the starting line: - Offering mailing lists in addition to forums. I for one, don't like using forums. - Community moderated threads, with end-user participation in forum moderation - The ability to make forum posts sticky, and build community getting started guides and howtos (sorely lacking at the moment) - The ability to help grow the community as a whole - The ability to build community driven FAQs that suppliment eZ's documentation The forums are fantastic, except when they're down for maintenence, which happens pretty often when the site is updated. Look, there is SO much you can do with a user community that it's hard to even begin describing it. eZ's implementation is awesome, and these forums are really truly useful, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to add mailing lists, user-driven initiatives, etc, to the mix? This isn't something that has been growing out of these forums, and that's what I was hoping to see. From a community perspective, eZ should be much larger than it is given the product success. Why not experiment to see what works? Ultimately, whatever we find works as a community could find it's way back into the eZ Community module, which is what I honestly was hoping to see. But there has to be some kind of will to have an outside forum. Jonathan
kracker (the)	Thursday 10 February 2005 12:43:36 am Hey Guys, I gotta tell ya, I agree with Jonathan here 120% on this subject. Jonathan you guys have my support, I'll help out any way that I can. Here's why ... I see a whole <i>lot</i> of solutions are found or created over the course of each year that never make it back up the food chain. Here's just a few examples ... <b>Missing Common Solutions</b> From developers, partners, forums and other sources back into the documentation, common knowledge into the hands of the users who need these unclear answerers and solutions right away out of the box. <b>Missing Advanced Solutions</b> From the same sources as above, only this time around the people who can barely get started using eZ publish never understand how to implement advanced solutions simply using eZ publish. Which is most frustrating when your trying to understand, explain or show users how to expand their horizons by showing them that there are really useful solutions for their web applications which are more than just your basic web application that stores pages in a database. <b>Popular Contributions</b> It's unclear what the favorite contributed solutions are, or which are worth checking out and which are not, it's ... a mess. <b>Community Support</b> A place for support and answers in a forum that is more user friendly to use, read and search. A place for people to try again to find a solution to their problem or question if their questions are not noticed or responded to at ez.no, another option for those who don't want to pay for support but still need an answer .... And the list goes on ... there are a lot of good reasons to provide users with alternatives, lets face it this is what free / open source software is all about and we need you to make this happen. So... stop by the site, <i>take a look at the posts</i>, <i>ask a question</i> that you have had for a long time that no one else could or would answer ... http://ezpublishforums.com/ Cheers, Graham eZ publish Punk Sole : Selling Live Water : Plutonium Member since: 2001.07.13 \|\| http://ezpedia.se7enx.com/
Kevin Cook	Tuesday 22 February 2005 3:07:47 pm Being relatively new to EzP, I hesitate to check in on this subject, but... Wouldn't it make more sense to move/migrate (whatever the term would be) the entire 'Community section' of ez.no to a new site, and then work on improving 'whatever' is it that needs improving? ie: community.ez.no? I agree with much of what Jonathan has said, but I would think the path of least resistance would be to build upon the existing knowledge base, rather than start from scratch. i.e have EzPublish turn over the 'community' to the community? Kevin R Cook.