eZ not Ready for Mass Market Yet

Author Message

Ric Landers

Sunday 04 May 2003 7:46:02 am

I'm sorry but eZpublish is just not ready for the masses.
It's clearly the killer app a lot of people have been waiting for, but it is one of the most difficult to configure I've ever seen. This, clearly, is a developer's application.

In addtion, the documention is virtually impossible for the layman to follow. There's a sciene to writing instructional materials and this science appears no where in the documentation. Moreover, the ducumentation is all over the place. Even in the manual each paragraph gives you five links to somewhere else.

Worst still, the writing has the style of one techi talking to another techi. And then there's the complete jumps from one topic to another you'll find again and again in the documentation. For example, in the section on Templates, it begins stepping you through the process of "creating an override template" you begin making the file and folder needed. You get that done, then all of a sudden the manual is talking about 'section function' 'fetch statements' ... 'parents' , 'children' etc. This is to say, discussion about the template you thought you were building is dropped like a hot potatoe, you're not into discussion about lists.

Please see below for the text on this. In short, I've spent a week trying to figure this application out and have gotten no where. I'm making no progress so I'm going to stop.

As I see it, one or two things are going to happen. Either someone is going to come along and develop a product just as good as this one with a far more user friendly interface, or the nice people at eZ will bring in a professional technical writer to provide the professional quality documentation this product deserately needs -- either way, my time will be better budgeted if I wait.

So, I'll be checking in on a monthly basis to see if things have improved, other than that, I'm out of here.

Here's the example of the documentation I cite above:

20:26 03/05/03

....In this example we will create an override template for the 'full' view mode of the Folder class. To test it, create a file called 'full_class_1.tpl' in the directory 'design/admin/override/templates/node/view'. Login to the admin interface, create a test folder, and fill it with some articles.

set [ViewCaching] to 'disabled' per instructions...

Created the file, but when I logged into admin, couldn't create a folder. I pressed "new" underneither the

Just a list
This example simply lists out the names of the articles who are children of the folder we are viewing. The fetch statement fetches a list of children whose parent node id equals our node id, and assigns it to the template variable $children. The name of our node is printed as a header, and then we use a loop to print the name of each child. Looping is done with the section function </sdk/eztemplate/view/function_section/>. Note how we assign a namespace for the loop, called 'Child' in this example.

James Ward

Sunday 04 May 2003 11:54:15 am

How fitting that you end your time here with yet another off-topic post. eZ Publish makes no apologies about its steep learning curve as it is far outweighed by the powerful new features you gain access too once you understand how to use the software. Had you spent your time in these forums carefully reading the posts and requesting assistance with specific problems, like the rest of us, you would be well on your way to taking advantage of all that eZ has to offer.

working at www.wardnet.com
blogging at www.jamesward.ca

Gabriel Ambuehl

Sunday 04 May 2003 12:08:12 pm

You're repeating yourself and frankly, it doesn't get any more interesting or relevant.

This is an open source project that's FREE for you. Take it or leave it. Instead of bitching about missing docs, you could contribute your own (they even allow you to add them with three clicks, which goes a long way to show how flexible the CMS really is) but I'm getting the impression you simply don't care enough to dive into the software and go figure it out on your own (like most of us are doing). Or you could just order the commercial support contract and get all the help you need.

Nobody says you can't post specific questions to the forums (but check the history first, a lot has been answered already) as most of us do and quite often, the eZ people will answer the really complicated stuff for free but please stop posting rants without any productive content.

Visit http://triligon.org

Ric Landers

Monday 05 May 2003 2:46:06 am

Hi,

Everybody, no more bitching, instead I'd like to make an contribution. . .

Typo3

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

bye-bye

Karsten Jennissen

Monday 05 May 2003 3:15:41 am

And I thought, you said all the other CMSs were "stupid". ;-)

Tony Wood

Monday 05 May 2003 3:27:19 am

If you take a look at the impressive list of projects created using eZpublish you will see that it has wide appeal.

Maybe it was just not for you.

I wish you luck learning your new CMS.

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

Ric Landers

Monday 05 May 2003 2:10:20 pm

eZ was awesome. I've never seen such seamless integration as with the modules in the demo. It's also appealing for its "tinker" value -- for those of you who like getting under the hood. I really don't have time for that, though. I need to put up some sites fast.

Still, I won't soon forget the elegance of eZ. There will also be a place in my heart for it. . .

Ric

Bill Christian

Tuesday 06 May 2003 9:32:03 am

Just a word of warning. Typo3 is incredibly more difficult to install and configure. They do provide some essential documentation but to do anything more substantial takes as much or more effort.

I found PostNuke the easiest to setup a quick preformatted web site. But for myself and others who are more technical in nature I appreciate the freedom in the eZ framework tool.

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