Why is the 3.9.0 release crippled by default?

Author Message

zurgutt -

Thursday 28 December 2006 8:59:48 pm

The ezp 3.9.0 has been out for some time now. I finally took time and installed it, to test the nice userview editing controls that come with it. However i discovered something rather strange and worrying during the install.

On the final page of setup, user is presented with message:
<b>"The ability to edit classes and templates have been disabled in the Administration Interface in order to comply with the warranty in the eZ Publish Now service."</b>

Indeed, when you continue to admin interface, the class editing and template editing are disabled.

How can this be?? Being able to create classes and edit templates are <b>essential</b> parts of ez publish, the very cornerstones of it!

So i would like to initiate conversation and get answers on following questions:

1. The eZ publish community distribution is fully GPL licenced. The "NO WARRANTY" clause is very basic part of GPL. How come it must be crippled to "comply" with warranty of something else, the "eZ Publish Now service" in this case?

2. What <b>is</b> this "eZ Publish Now service warranty"? Where can one read it? It is not linked in the message. I have looked at the eZ Publish Now webpages on ez.no, i have searched the site, i have googled, cant find it.

3. How does this disabling of essential parts of admin interface benefit the ez publish community?

It seems - and i hope i am imagining this - that only one benefiting from such setup is eZ systems, to whom people will turn for commercial support when they get confused because they cant edit classes or create overrides as described in documentation. But a lot more people will give up and move to something more user friendly, hurting the community in general. We are not too many as it is..

I hope this unfeature is removed in future releases.

End note: yes i did read the full message and i saw there are instructions on how to reenable template and class editing. These instructions are <b>poor excuse for unnecessarily disabling them in first place</b>. Also the importance of disabled features is not stressed, instructions are not detailed enough for newbies and will most likely be dismissed and forgotten by most. People expect that default setup as done by wizard is good and includes everything essential.

The re-enabling instructions can be read on eZpedia wiki at http://ezpedia.org/wiki/en/ez/solution_modify_siteaccessrules_to_allow_advanced_editing

Certified eZ developer looking for projects.
zurgutt at gg.ee

Kristof Coomans

Friday 29 December 2006 12:55:06 am

I agree with Zurgutt. Can't we have a different repository with different ezwebin packages for the community and the eZ publish Now service?

 

independent eZ Publish developer and service provider | http://blog.coomanskristof.be | http://ezpedia.org

kracker (the)

Friday 29 December 2006 1:11:59 am

I too agree with Zurgutt.

Yet why is this feature so poorly implemented.

If you wish to impose restrictions of this nature I would imagine users and administrators would use this feature differently.

I would not impose this restriction at a 'siteaccess' level rather I would impose these restrictions at a role/group/user permissions level instead.

This would allow at least one user to use this functionality say the 'admin' user in the in 'administrators' group/role.

I would then impose this restriction for users in the 'editors' role.

The way this restriction was implemented is incomplete.

#1 - I would expect these settings (at any level) properly configured would prevent <i>use/access</i> to the functionality.
#2 - I would expect these settings (at any level) properly configured would prevent the <i>display</i> of the functionality.

I think the users who don't use the setup at all, also don't need to know the warning messages, or see the links to the functionality. It's not a user friendly implementation of functional restrictions and informational / error messages.

I don't think the very users eZ systems is trying to inform about the crippled setup settings want this feature at all. So it's ugly for end users and unfriendly to developers.

If the functionality included additional template code to prevent the display of this functionality (next logical step) and all of it was disabled by default it would not be quite the problem it is now.

//kracker

Member since: 2001.07.13 || http://ezpedia.se7enx.com/

David Boman

Friday 29 December 2006 2:18:45 am

... I will also join the crowd that does not feel comfortable with this change. Having done a lot of eZ-installations previously I clicked through the wizard quite quick and did not note this message. Not knowing that this was a 'feature', I spent several hours on trying to find the error and find a patch for it. Same with my colleauge who was excited of the new ezPublish 3.9.0 but decided to wait until 3.9.1 as he found it to inmature now (believing that class edititing was a bug ... )

I don't really understand the reason behind the disabling but if this is the way it going to be, then at least give a more information that Kernel(22)-error ...

That beeing said I must give a lot of cred to the team behind the new release! This is definately the best version ever! Especially the new frontend interface has made a big change to the look and feel of the default installed site! Keep up the good work!

Sandra Parente

Friday 29 December 2006 3:04:18 am

I'm not a newbye, so I know how to enable class and template editing again, but I think it is against the spirit of eZ community.
On the contrary in http://ez.no/ezpublish/roadmap/ez_publish_3_9 eZ team wrote that this release has been unofficially named "the community release"...

Sandra Parente
www.netbliss.it

zurgutt -

Friday 05 January 2007 2:23:32 am

It has been a week and not a peep from people responsible of implementing this unfeature. Dont they read the forums or just dont give a fck about what the community thinks? It sure starts to look like deliberate silence.

Meanwhile it has become clear that many users are having problem with it.

I insist that the questions in the original post be answered.

Certified eZ developer looking for projects.
zurgutt at gg.ee

kracker (the)

Friday 05 January 2007 3:28:17 am

<i>Agreed</i>

//kracker

<i>Home Movies : The Compliments Song</i>

Member since: 2001.07.13 || http://ezpedia.se7enx.com/

Softriva .com

Friday 05 January 2007 3:53:03 am

I am agree on the above 100%.

I have fallen into what I call a trap and I even posted a question.

http://ez.no/community/forum/install_configuration/the_requested_page_could_not_be_displayed_22

Vidar Langseid

Friday 05 January 2007 5:02:00 am

eZ publish is a product we release with both a open source license and a commercial license. One of our main goals has been to deliver the same software under both licenses. We have never wanted to release only a limited or light version as open source, something which many other software vendors do....We therefor don't fancy the idea of differentiate the software in a free and a commercial version. This means that we do need to make compromises. Sometimes we implement features which are wanted by the community only, other times we do things that is requested by paying clients.
So to answer #1, our objective was simply to follow what have always been one of our goals; Provide the same software for both the community and paying clients.

#2 eZ Publish Now is a hosted service where we among other things provide eZ network (see http://ez.no/ezpublish/now for the full list). This means that clients are automatically provided with patches and critical bug fixes etc. As we also take a great deal of responsibility for clients buying eZ Publish Now, we don't allow these clients to change content class definitions. That have the potential to easily break the site completely.

#3 I agree that this change in the default configuration is not of a big benefit to the community. Frankly, it was never meant to be either. As i said previously, it is more of a compromise we did to prevent having to deal with a fork; a open source version and a commercial version. However, we did realize that this would be some pain for many users as most community users would really want to change the class definitions. Therefore we did another compromise: We explained clearly in the setup wizard how to revert back to old behavior. We thought the community would think that was okay, but maybe we were wrong...

Anyway, this is all about a (small) configuration issue. It is anyway possible for us to add this configuration settings to eZ Publish Now clients by a simple script. It is a little bit hassle, but it is something we can live with. It won't be that much effort for us to comply with you (the community) in this particularly case. I'll put this on the to-do list for 3.9.1

But back to the comment from Kristof. In all this years eZ publish has been the same software, no matter if you have used the open source license or a commercial one. This should prove that we also feel committed to the open source community. If we start differentiate the software I am afraid people will start thinking that our agenda would be to implement features that we do not want to share with the open source community

Regarding "the community release", I don't feel that this issue makes that a contradiction. AFAIK, we have incorporated more community wishes in this release than what we have done in any previous release. However, I would also admit that we where not able to include as many pathes and community contributions as we hoped for when we started the 3.9 release cycle. That is something we need to work on.

Regarding response time, I am sorry. Of course we care what the community things. I also have to admit that we are quite behind on answering questions on sdk-public mailinglist as well. We'll start next week to get back on track there as well.

Kristof Coomans

Friday 05 January 2007 5:18:08 am

Hi Vidar, thanks for the clarification.

With <b>different</b> ezwebin packages for the community and the eZ publish Now service, I mean that <i>only the additional site access rules</i> to comply with the eZ publish Now service could be <i>stripped</i> from the community version. You don't really differentiate the software in that case, just the settings are adapted to the target group.

independent eZ Publish developer and service provider | http://blog.coomanskristof.be | http://ezpedia.org

kracker (the)

Friday 05 January 2007 6:15:30 am

I question (politely) the checks and balances which weigh the actual resulting implementation of another's needed features, like the ones in question in this thread is (and will continue to be the opinion of me and apparently others of the community) of poor design and implements at the very least the functionality in a way that is of most benefit to eZ systems not the community.

#1 - I welcome the best of eZ system's additions to eZ publish. This is not one of them.

#2 - <i>"As we also take a great deal of responsibility for clients buying eZ Publish Now, we don't allow these clients to change content class definitions. That have the potential to easily break the site completely."</i>

eZ systems implemented features which benefit them and their goals to specifically support good features (done badly) in eZ publish. Where these features placed in a specification available on ez.no? I think that at least the settings should have been omitted from eZ publish by default as the functionality added to 3.9 uses them.

#3 - <i>"I agree that this change in the default configuration is not of a big benefit to the community. Frankly, it was never meant to be either."</i>

Which I think is why many in the community are upset that the community has little resolve to prevent features which are implemented in a way which creates a natural disadvantage and crippled the community product/release.

I think you should have implemented a flexible design for these features and not a static one which cripples eZ publish by default. You <b>are</b> telling users to get ready to go through a lot just to experiment with a web app package, it's a great way to choke off new users to the community.

I continue to be confused with why the community is a second concern when implementing functionality in such a clearly tacked on way which hurts the community but not be concerned about the negative feature(s) introduced as a direct side affect of the implementation chosen by eZ systems.

An no one wants to fork eZ, those who do are mad. We simple do not want negative features to be introduced like this ... ever. It's stunts like this that drive users away (to a competitor) and pressure vendors other than eZ systems.

<i>We thought the community would think that was okay, but maybe we were wrong...</i>

I think you did not go far enough with the design of the implementation. It's a few patched on additions that can be done cheeply and quickly but not completely or well. It's just enough for you and not nearly enough (features/design) for the rest of us to really use well.

<i>"Anyway, this is all about a (small) configuration issue. It is anyway possible for us to add this configuration settings to eZ Publish Now clients by a simple script. It is a little bit hassle, but it is something we can live with. It won't be that much effort for us to comply with you (the community) in this particularly case. I'll put this on the to-do list for 3.9.1</i>

This is not limited to a small configuration issue. It speaks to the gaps between the community and eZ systems, both in terms of communication of issues surrounding this addition, the testing and warning users of the new problems introduced for them by eZ systems.

It speaks to how little thought we receive in times like this where you could have implemented most of these settings additions in your eZ Publish Now Service (scripts), yet instead <i>you kinda did the least possible</i> and just dumped as sizeable load of bad ideas in setting and code form (for others than eZ systems itself) into eZ publish trunk.

<i>Regarding "the community release", I don't feel that this issue makes that a contradiction. AFAIK, we have incorporated more community wishes in this release than what we have done in any previous release. However, I would also admit that we where not able to include as many pathes and community contributions as we hoped for when we started the 3.9 release cycle. That is something we need to work on.</i>

It just shows the distance between the average member in the community not directly associated with eZ systems business model and the open source / free community.

eZ releases free / open source software but their development model is very proprietary. The development of eZ publish come from or goes through eZ systems primarily, the development of eZ publish is a much more distant activity which really happens offline and is rarely directly engaging of the community (not counting eZ partners or eZ celebs)

The almost always stale information on the page, http://ez.no/community/developer
is a clear sign of this. Where it's a side thought for advertising but not collaboration.

The developer section recently added toolbar to the community page is little more
than a page to advertise eZ publish not provide developer resources to see this feature's design being implemented and share a discussion with eZ systems before release. Any developer quickly sees clearly the break between collaborative development and observer community. eZ community overall observe and reacts to compensate not collaborate to the public at large, you have to know someone to get in good to get new features or design issues discussed offline.

<i>"Regarding response time, I am sorry. Of course we care what the community things."</i>

I respect your post on the subject and thank you for it. Please don't lead the community into these pitfalls so silently with such an anticipated release. We really might have be able to avoid these threads after a major release.

<b>Summary</b>

- Please don't avoided how badly implemented it all of the individual features are from our perspective and don't tread on eZ publish.
- It's a bad implementation from a settings addition level, to a setup level, to a runtime / debug level, from a user role and permission level, to a template level, heck to a php kernel level .. and i really want the whole thing to be addressed properly. I still believe it should be implemented at a role permissions level not at a site/access level.
- It's slips like this that lead to the worst parts of eZ
- This subsystem tacked on in this way could have the settings striped out of the default package but that still leaves the parts of the features that are bad not addressed.
- I have to use the bad designs that make it into eZ publish ...
- I don't mean to be mean, and perhaps it's my fault for not saying anything this whole time till recently even when I knew . but it's just ... retarded implementation overall for both parties.
- and what are the odds it will be replaced with what i describe with polish in 2007, i hope but i fear the past may overtake the matter all to quickly. and part of me, is screaming that, where this all is lacking wasn't kept in check and still feels like a blind person being guided by their companion into harms way (who can revert the evil that regardless of intent is introduced into eZ publish's svn).

//kracker
<i>I support the community, I've never known ..</i>

Member since: 2001.07.13 || http://ezpedia.se7enx.com/

zurgutt -

Friday 05 January 2007 7:24:47 am

Thanks for reply, Vidar.

It clears the situation somewhat, but still does not give satisfactory justification to current setup. And for most part does not answer questions I proposed. Ill explain in more detail below, sorry for extensive quoting:

<i>eZ publish is a product we release with both a open source license and a commercial license. One of our main goals has been to deliver the same software under both licenses. We have never wanted to release only a limited or light version as open source, something which many other software vendors do....We therefor don't fancy the idea of differentiate the software in a free and a commercial version.</i>
This is all good and commendable. But irrelevant to the problem - nobody wants to fork or differentiate the software. Its about an unwanted configuration setting that is forced on users in a crude manner during setup.

<i>This means that we do need to make compromises. Sometimes we implement features which are wanted by the community only, other times we do things that is requested by paying clients.</i>
There is no need to make any compromise here! The setup should ask "Are you using a commercial eZ Publish Now service?" If "yes", option(s) related to that should be presented. If not then these settings are irrelevant to the user and should <b>not be shown or set</b>.

<i>So to answer #1, our objective was simply to follow what have always been one of our goals; Provide the same software for both the community and paying clients.</i>
No, this does not compute. There is no need to force this setting on all users to provide same software. I could agree that this is a case of very poorly thought through setup step, perhaps strapped on on a last minute? If so then im not blaming anyone - shit happens, just admit it and fix :)

<i>#2 eZ Publish Now is a hosted service where we among other things provide eZ network (see http://ez.no/ezpublish/now for the full list). This means that clients are automatically provided with patches and critical bug fixes etc. As we also take a great deal of responsibility for clients buying eZ Publish Now, we don't allow these clients to change content class definitions. That have the potential to easily break the site completely.</i>
Irrelevant. There is absolutely no reason to force the setting on whole world to have it on for your clients. Look at suggestion above for reasonable setup. Moreso, AFAIK for eZ Publish Now clients the setup of system is done by you and you are well aware of requirements.. why contaminate the wizard?

To come back to actual question - the "ez publish now warranty" is mentioned. What is it and where can i read it? Im quite curious about what it warrants :)

<i>#3 I agree that this change in the default configuration is not of a big benefit to the community. Frankly, it was never meant to be either.</i>
"Not big benefit" is an understatement, it makes system unusable for many people so i'd rather call it a critical bug.

<i>
As i said previously, it is more of a compromise we did to prevent having to deal with a fork; a open source version and a commercial version. However, we did realize that this would be some pain for many users as most community users would really want to change the class definitions. Therefore we did another compromise: We explained clearly in the setup wizard how to revert back to old behavior. We thought the community would think that was okay, but maybe we were wrong...</i>
You definately were wrong. As can be seen from here and other problem posts in forums, it is a problem for many and not ok. Even if the instructions were clear. A newbie would not know what exactly "remove settings" means. Remove values after the = ? Remove some lines, all lines? Especially in wizard you have to "think newbie".

The bottom line is - clicking through wizard with default settings should give a functional site and it does not as of now.

<i>Anyway, this is all about a (small) configuration issue. It is anyway possible for us to add this configuration settings to eZ Publish Now clients by a simple script. It is a little bit hassle, but it is something we can live with. It won't be that much effort for us to comply with you (the community) in this particularly case. I'll put this on the to-do list for 3.9.1</i>
Great! You could just have acknowledged the mistake right away and promised to fix it and i would just have said thanks a lot, but the poor attempt to justify it demanded for one more reply ;)

<i>But back to the comment from Kristof. In all this years eZ publish has been the same software, no matter if you have used the open source license or a commercial one. This should prove that we also feel committed to the open source community. If we start differentiate the software I am afraid people will start thinking that our agenda would be to implement features that we do not want to share with the open source community</i>
Now, instead of feeling that you dont want to share i got feeling that community is second rate and getting screwed to accommodate your business clients. Its a even worse feeling.

<i>AFAIK, we have incorporated more community wishes in this release than what we have done in any previous release. However, I would also admit that we where not able to include as many pathes and community contributions as we hoped for when we started the 3.9 release cycle. That is something we need to work on.</i>
No complaints here - the 3.9 has great stuff and will have more. Excellent work! :)

Final note: it may seem that i was coming on on a bit sharp note with this issue. To be on record, i have nothing against eZ Systems and them doing business on the ezp :) It just seemed that this particular case went over the line and i believe in speaking my mind and right away. Helps to settle things quickly :)

Live long and prosper!

Certified eZ developer looking for projects.
zurgutt at gg.ee

Brookins Consulting

Friday 05 January 2007 7:52:45 am

A very wise person mentioned to me in <i>passing</i> recently ...

<i>"Keep doing the good work, eZ needs a strong community that sometimes brings eZ back on track :)"</i>

For as distant a directive as any to be moved by, it ment a lot to hear it.

eZ Partner | North American Experience
http://brookinsconsulting.com/experience

kracker (the)

Friday 05 January 2007 8:15:24 am

<i>
>This means that we do need to make compromises.
> Sometimes we implement features which are wanted
> by the community only, other times we do things
> that is requested by paying clients.
</i>
<i>
>> There is no need to make any compromise here!
>> The setup should ask "Are you using a commercial
>> eZ Publish Now service?" If "yes", option(s) related
>> to that should be presented. If not then these settings
>> are irrelevant to the user and should not be shown or set.
</i>

I think the idea that the user ever needs to tell eZ publish
via any setting in eZ publish gpl is an example of a destructive
feature settings being added to the base software package which did
not need to be redistributed to anyone outside of eZ systems for
eZ publish Now Hosting Service.

The settings are the first of several layers to this implementation's affect.

1. <i>Settings</i>

The settings simply did not need to be redistributed, or added to trunk and should have been removed before release.

2. <i>Implementation of restrictions</i>

From the error messages, setup wizard, kernel ... just feel like toolbars in 3.4 all over again.

<b>*</b> I really prefer the ability to limit user groups / roles from using admin features at a more granular and flexible level</b> <i>not</i> on a siteacess level, or by default affecting the admin role

<b>*</b> I would prefer the ability to never use the admin and the admin to be much like root in unix-like operating systems.

<b>*</b>I would prefer the introduction to eZ publish trunk a supporting-admin role which is limited much like the eZ publish Now service restrictions spirit (of the feature) is trying to reach without these limitations in a hackish implementation.

Implementing the restriction as per user's role permissions/restrictions (as controls to disable as well as enable) seems so simply the way this problem should have been addressed in the first place for a flexible implementation of these restrictions (as optional features configured by default as disabled) which could be used to meet eZ system's needs without creating this baggage.

It's a neat idea of many other complete features, it's also a bad implementation of them.
Pursue it as a complete implementation of the features it's faking that it could be offering.
I documented most of them in detail on this thread. It's just not enough ...

//kracker
<i>When I think of eZ, I think of streamline advanced software design, modular flexibility. This is freaking eZ publish we are talking about, not mombo or php nuke ...</i>

Member since: 2001.07.13 || http://ezpedia.se7enx.com/

Vidar Langseid

Wednesday 10 January 2007 1:25:00 am

I'll try to answer all of you in turn:
Kristof:
Yes, I get what you mean and as I have said; we'll skip the additional
siteaccess rules from 3.9.1

kracker:
I get that the community is unhappy with fact that we the added the mentioned
configurations in settings/override/site.ini.append.php.
You could argue pros and cons for having this as a ini setting or permission
setting, but that doesn't change the fact. It is inconvenient for the
community and as I said : We'll remove it.

FYI: The possibility to deny certain views by ini settings is not something we developed now for 3.9. This functionality has been there for a very long time.

In regards to doing the same thing using the admin interface and the
permission system: That is actually possible as today, but not in a
convenient way since we don't have to possible to define policies that revoke
rights (you may only add policies that grant you access to do things). Having
the possibility to add "revoke" policies would be very nice (this as also
been requested by the community) but such a feature will be cause big changes in the permission system so other tasks has been prioritized instead.

zurgutt:
Regarding eZ Publish Now, please have a look at the terms and conditions:
http://ez.no/store/terms/ez_publish_now_terms_and_conditions

Basically, we maintain and provide bugfixes for templates and it is then important that class definitions comply with the templates.

<i>Great! You could just have acknowledged the mistake right away and promised
to fix it and i would just have said thanks a lot, but the poor attempt to
justify it demanded for one more reply ;)</i>
Well, you asked for a explanation, and that is what I gave you. Also, as you
are implying, it was a last-minute-change... As far as I remember, this
change was first time released in eZ publish 3.9rc2....Personally, I also
underestimated the resistance from the community in this matter.

Best regards,
Vidar L

kracker (the)

Wednesday 10 January 2007 6:21:43 am

Vidar,

Thank you so <i>very much</i> for hearing and responding to each of our individual points of comment!

<i>//kracker
Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie - Welcome to the Internet Help Department</i>

Member since: 2001.07.13 || http://ezpedia.se7enx.com/

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