Category Programming

The Future of eZ publish and eZ components

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Now you can take a look into the future of eZ publish development, as well as the eZ components. I have conducted and published an email interview with five of eZ systems’ leaders of the development team.

eZ components

Ideas for future eZ components are:

  • a framework component,
  • a MVC component,
  • a component for sending IPC messages between different parts of an application,
  • a workflow component,
  • a search component.

eZ publish

  • The eZ publish 4.0 Features List has just been published.
  • The eZ publish 4.0 Roadmap will be published beginning of June.
  • eZ publish 4.0 will be based on PHP 6, mainly because of Unicode support.

Self-fullfilling Prophecy

Our dev leaders provide lots of valuable information and are doing a fine job as fortunetellers – as they are predicting a future they shape themselves, it should become a self-fullfilling prophecy 🙂

Honestly, I fully trust in what they are saying and doing, there’s a lot of intelligence accumulated at eZ systems. Just look at the high quality of eZ components, and you will be able to anticipate just how good eZ publish 4, the next big version of eZ publish, is going to be.

Templates – Who Cares?

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

… everyone, it seems!

Those with some years of experience in the software business know: the implementation or decision upon a template engine is always good for flame wars.

Why? Templates are such a basic technology of a CMS, a must-have and not really something sexy. Those who hoped to make templates sexy, invented XSLT.

So why? Because it is a basic technology!

These are the flame war factors:

You can’t get Tempates out of Your Way

Every developer or Web designer building a Web site on top of a CMS, has to cope with the integrated template system, sooner or later. You will have a love-and-hate-relationship, because on the one side they help you, on the other side, every implementation has its pros and cons.

Love-and-hate-relationships are not really something that makes the involved parties calm and relaxed.

Who Takes Over the Bridge?

Templates are supposed to build a bridge between the programmers, who care about the business logic of a solution, and the designers who care about the user experience aka GUI. Thus, there are two groups with diverging interests affected by templates: programmers and Web designers. Every experienced how different their thinking can be? OK, then you clearly see the potential for conflict.

Love, Peace – and Common Sense

The discussion about the new template language for eZ publish, implemented as a library in the realm of the
eZ components, has of course been long, and is still ongoing – but there’s light.

It was interesting to observe, how the eZ components team will fight the fight and I must say, they did a good job.

So, what was it that created love and peace in eZ templates land? It was pragmatism: whenever a discussion becomes lengthy and and unfocused, bring it down to the facts, for example with a summary of past input and suggestions for solutions.

Doesn’t sound sexy? No, it doesn’t. Tempates are not sexy, they are basic technology, so let’s be pragmatic and treat it like that, so let’s cool down discussions and go back to work.

Sounds simple? It does, but is hard work, because you need to focus on the result!

You love such discussions? Jump in, you got time until Monday, 12:00.

PS: Did you find any irony in this text? Let me know 🙂

LinuxTag with "Information Web" Track (CfP 3 more days)

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

The LinuxTag 2006 will have three focus topics, one of them is “Information Web”, which comprises CMSs, Wikis, Weblogs, etc.

If you got something important to say about this topic in English or German: the Call for Papers will end this Sunday, January 15th – only 3 more days!

After organising last year’s OscomTag subconference at LinuxTag 2005 together with Markus Nix, the LinuxTag organizers asked me whether I would like to lead the team preparing the Information Web track this year. After contacting some of the OscomTag 2005 speakers, we got together a great group of 10 people:

I am very much looking forward to enjoying this event from May 3-6!

X-mas Present for Beta Geeks: new eZ components released

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Here’s your early x-mas present: the eZ components beta2 are out! Seems like our developers had a lot of fun working on this release – that’s the impression I get from Toby‘s article and blog entry. When studying the changelog, it becomes clear that they put quite some effort into making this release useful for early adopters.

It makes me extremely happy to see the good development of the eZ components, as this is state-of-the-art PHP 5 development – right what is needed to showcase PHP’s OO-power. Now that the inline docs are available online, the clean design and implementation becomes obvious.

If you love to live cutting edge with PHP 5, check out the components and work with them. There are also Powered by eZ components logos available if you want to show off as a beta geek 🙂

Oh yes, and there’s #ezcomponents on irc.freenode.net now!

Call for Papers: eZ publish Conference 2006

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

The call for papers for next year’s eZ publish Conference is out.

eZ is accepting proposals on the following topics:

  • eZ publish
  • Enterprise CMS
  • Enterprise PHP

The submission deadline for all proposals is January 16, 2006.

eZ publish Conference 2006 will take place in Skien/Norway from June 20-23, 2006.

Of course, the eZ Enterprise Components [1] will be a hot topic there, as well as the forthcoming eZ publish 4.0.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

[1]
Components from SVN Tutorial

LOTS of Workshops and Talks

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Soon, there will be LOTS of workshops and talks on Open Source in Switzerland. For the second time, this event takes place in Bern/Switzerland, from Feb 17-19.

This is my first time representing eZ systems at an Open Source event and I am looking forward to that.

I am going to do several presentation on the eZ publish CMS: a workshop, a talk, and a demo. You can grab the first eZ publish Live-CDs there, I am going to bring them with me. They are bootable CDs, based on Mandrake Move and having a ready-made eZ publish pre-installed.

At the end of LOTS, I will moderate a panel discussion on Open Events – The Open Source Bazaar. Basically, we will try to identify differences and similarities between Open Source and typical business events, the way how knowledge is shared at “Bazaars” like LOTS, etc.

Open Marketing and the Ethics of Sharing

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Zend recently decided to not call themselves the creators of PHP anymore. This change in Zend’s marketing has been long overdue. It caused friction with some PHP core developers over the past years that spread into the PHP community.

Others also make mistakes

It is not that Zend is the only company in the Open Source market that made some marketing mistakes in the past. MySQL for example had their CTO Monty Widenius talk fancier then usual in an internally conducted interview and the answers did not sound like he really said them. It made known members of the MySQL community wonder who kidnapped Monty.

Sex sells?

To some marketing experts, the Open Source community might seem like a mine-field with many traps, because there are just too many critical thinkers in the community. It is so because they don’t fully understand the ethics of sharing.

Marketing and ethics – how does that go together? Isn’t marketing based on emotions and instincts? Catching you with the “sex sells” trick? Open Marketing is different – yet still emotional.

Have a lot of fun

Open Marketing addresses the intellect, because in Open Source it’s all about transparency: transparent software (code), transparent collaboration (mailinglists), transparent deficiency (bugs), …

Open Marketing also addresses emotions, because it’s fun. After your Linux installation, you read “Have a lot of fun”. Open Source developers identify with what they do, because they believe in their skills, the good work of the team, the value of sharing. They care about their work and the results – isn’t that emotional?

Hubs and innovation

Intellect and emotions come together in the ethics of sharing. It’s supporters believe that they can still gain although sharing, or better: they gain because they share. The more you share, the more you become the center of communication flows in the Open Source community. Speaking in terms of communication theory, you become a hub in a communication network.

What does that have to do with Open Marketing? It means that the correct marketing is vital to an Open Source company because it needs to be one of the main hubs in the communication flow of the Open Source community it targets at. Otherwise, the company will slowly loose it’s innovative power and market share respectively.

Proprietary vs. Open Marketing

The ethic of sharing is not so much about naive persons longing to be good, instead it is at the heart of the Open Source business, it is egoistic as well as altruistic at once, intellectual and emotional, and the basis for making money.

To summarize: Open Marketing is just as “copyleft” to the traditional marketing, as the GPL is to proprietary software licensing. It is not about illusions, it is about realities. In that sense, Zend just fixed a bug in their marketing and move from a sometimes proprietary style marketingto a better open marketing. Welcome back to reality!

German PHP 5 Books

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My favourite German publisher is dpunkt.verlag. Recently, a book on PHP 5 was published that I have helped them with and there are two others in the pipeline written by notable authors. The three books complement each other, so depending on your skill- set, you could pick one, two or all of them. Of course, each of them is of high quality:

PHP 5 für Fortgeschrittene

In a nutshell: For experienced devs, curious to learn PHP 5.

The 380 pages are a condensed, translated, and updated version of Harry’s excellent PHP Anthology. PHP 5 für Fortgeschrittene is meant for experienced PHP 4 developers who want to learn about what’s new in PHP 5 on a very practical basis. Actually, the strength of the book is that it takes care of the nitty-gritty when migrating from PHP4 to PHP 5 with lots of real-world examples.

It was actually me who did the updates, especially dealing with the new OO features in PHP 5. While writing the updates, I realized how the evolution of the book matches with the intention of the book to guide through PHP4-to-PHP5 migration issues, because all of Harry’s source code was PHP 4. Making the book PHP 5-focused, required me to work just like someone who sould migrate his PHP 4 application.

BTW: Cornelia Boenigk did a wonderful job in translating Harry’s text to German, I regard her as one of the best technical translaters of programming books from English to German.

PHP 5 für Fortgeschrittene is available since November.

dpunkt.verlag book info

Professionelle Softwareentwicklung mit PHP 5

In a nutshell: Makes a PHP 4-pro become a PHP5-guru.

This one should be out shortly. Sebastian Bergman wrote it and it is mostly an in-depth introduction to the OO-features of PHP 5. Sebastian let me review the pre-published version and I admire his precise and clean explanation of the sometimes inevitably complex topic of objectoriented programming. Everything important is mentioned, easy to comprehend, the sample code is of high usefulness. If you’re a PHP 4-pro, get this one to become a PHP 5-guru.

dpunkt.verlag book info

The book’s Website

PHP 5

In a nutshell: Gets you started with PHP 5.

I just finished to review the final draft of this one and got the impression that it is just what is needed to get PHP novices started. The authors are well-known members of the German PHP community: Hakan Kücükyilmaz, Alexander Merz, Thomas Haas. Throughout the book, they explain the important aspects of PHP 5 with patience, accuracy, and the knowledge of how a novice should be guided. Saying that, it comes with no surprise that the book is the result of several PHP training courses.

This book is out in March.

dpunkt.verlag book info

Some might argue, that these books are late as PHP 5 is already out for some time, but the strategy of dpunkt.verlag is to publish high-quality books – and they simply take time. This is what I experienced myself when writing for dpunkt.verlag: unless your text is perfect, they are not satisfied with the results and they will push you to make it perfect. A sometimes painfull, but in the long-run successfull strategy: educative for the authors, beneficial for the readers.