Summary of last week's meeting with eZ.
Hi.
Last weekend there was a developer gathering, and my part in it was meeting the guys behind eZ Publish[1]. eZ Publish (hence "eZ") is a content management system which we are planning to switch to on skolelinux.org, and to possibly bundle in Skolelinux.
The reason why we are considering to switch from Plone[2] is that we have some issues -- mainly in the workflow -- with Plone today, which eZ is able to remedy. Unless you can get hold of free professional support from developers behind another CMS in question, we aren't interested in doing yet another CMS-debate.
During a the meeting, I and a few others in the project -- namely Arnt-Ove Gregersen, Pablo Pita Leira and Ralf Gesellensetter -- got to know some of the developers behind eZ. They demonstrated how eZ works, how it met some of our requirements (more later), and claimed that they would seriously consider to develop some of the features we miss.
Today's skolelinux.org is, in my honest opinion, a huge improvement from the old pages. We are, however, dissatisfied with a few issues.
First and foremost, the workflow is cumbersome. For several reasons I won't dwelve too deep in, translators of content today have to manually make a new instance of the page in question, and then send an email to one or more mailing lists to inform about the change. This, obviously, isn't optimal. It would be way better if the CMS could automatically notify the right mailing lists and inform about the changes. eZ features this.
Secondly, to edit a web page, one has to log in with the Plone webinterface. (Yes, I know of the FTP-interface. It's way too buggy.) This alone scares a lot of potential contributors -- mainly the core developers -- from doing changes on the webpage at all. While this isn't necessarily true for everyone, it is a nuicance not to be able to work with the tools they preffer, which obviously is discouraging. eZ has support for WebDAV, and Bård Farstad is looking into adding support for Subversion in eZ, based on our request.
Thirdly, eZ has a more sane way to handle content than Plone has. Plone gives you -- by default -- three options: to save the document as plain text, as HTML or as "structured text" (Zope-thingy). Once you have chosen a format, you have to stick to it. eZ saves everything internally as XML and offers only a *subset* of the HTML-code to the user. This enables them to create various input- and output-filters, so a document first edited by Joe in OpenOffice can later be edited by Jane in HTML -- and downloaded as a PDF for the web user.
In addition, it's hard to sync the excellent documentation we have available, such as the "ICT-manual" and Klaus's great collection of notes, from DocBook in CVS to the web. Obviously, we don't want to change their working repository, so we want to be easily able to /sync/ content from one source to the other.
These are the main issues today, and if -- and only if -- eZ (or some other CMS, read note above) can remedy some or all of them, I am happy to spend the time needed to do the transition.
Jonas Smedegaard has volunteered to help create a Debian package of eZ 3.5, which is required for it to be bundled with Skolelinux. Any progress here?
~
[1] http://www.ez.no
[2] http://www.plone.org
--
Alex Brasetvik
PS: I apologize this mail being a bit late -- I've been sick and have had lots of school work.
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