Stuff and Content

In my spare time I've been hanging out with a bunch of Ruby/Rails people. They are a fun bunch however they don't seem to like it when you point out that MVC existed well before Rails. One thing that have put me onto is Git. Git is a distributed revision control / software configuration management project. You may have heard of it, Linus Torvalds (that clever guy behind Linux) wrote it to manage kernel development. There is plenty to read about it on Wikipedia So why Git? This week I've been working on an eZ Publish 4.0 project that needed the ezApprove2 workflow extension. The version in the contribs says it has 3.7 support...the eZ projects site says it work with 3.x..no 4.0 except in the subversion repository on the projects site! So I check it out svn co http://svn.projects.ez.no/ezapprove2/ezapprove2/ezp4/trunk/extension/ezapprove2 to investigate if it meets the requirements. As part of this process I notice some bugs and being a good open source user I fix th...

I've just uploaded a rating module to the contribution section on the eZ site. The Star Rating module introduces a datatype that can be added to any content classes to allow it to be rated. While I haven't checked the datatype has been designed so it should be possible to add multiple ratings to a single content class. The extension has been designed with accessibility in mind and will function without javascript, images or CSS. The catalyst for the extension was CSS star rating from Komodo Media and the extension contains CSS and images from this project. To add some web 2.0 goodness, if the xajax extension is enabled and the user has access ratings will be done via ajax calls. The xajax component requires newer versions (0.5+) of the xajax library so it must be downloaded from the projects site an not from the contributions section of the eZ site. View caching & dynamic content One of the issues I came across is that by making the rating a datatype, is that the d...

Recently I've been playing about on the eZ Publish projects site and have joined a couple of projects. One that I've previously has some involvement in is Kristof's xajax plugin . I quite like xajax as it's takes care of most of the javascript and allows you to manipulate the browser DOM via PHP. I've joined the project as a member, updated the xajax libraries to 0.5 beta 4 ( they were on beta 2) and created a download . Initially I was going to upgrade the extension to work with eZ 4.0, however there was nothing to do. It works fine in eZ 4.0 and my changes are simply an upgrade to the xajax library. Given the extension basically exposes the xajax libraries and is unlikely to change too much I wonder it it's worth linking the version of the extension to the xajax library version? Happy xajaxing!

Disclaimers usually go at the bottom of a post but because this one is quite lengthy I've decided to put it at the top. Mostly the stuff I post here is of a technical nature, but this time I'm posting an option piece, and as such it is full of wild speculation, personal thoughts, suggestions and of course opinion, all of which may have no basis in any reality other than my own. You are here - the current state of play I've been using eZPublish 4.0 since the beginning of the year. It's not quite what I envisioned when the rumbling of version 4.0 first started, oh so long ago, actually it's nothing like what I imagined. Hence the title of this post. Initially Vista (Longhorn) was slated as a "minor step" between Windows XP (Whistler) and Blackcomb. However it gradually took on many of the features slated for Blackcomb. People got excited, but it's release was delayed several times, the developers were given other priorities and finally development ...

I realise that with the newish (introduced in version 3.9) "file" mail transport option can be used to debug mail, but in some cases it's easier if the system actually sends the mail (to me and not the intended precipitant). So I've updated the subversion repository of Kristof Coomans' eZMail Debug patch to work with eZ Publish 4.0.0 To use, simply download the patched ezmail.php from http://pubsvn.ez.no/community/trunk/hacks/ezmaildebug/patches/4.0.0/lib/ezutils/classes/ezmail.php and save it to lib/ezutils/classes/ezmail.php of your eZ Publish 4.0.0 install. Remember that if you are using SMTP transport..." Due to a bug in eZ Publish 4.0.0, you need to download the updated version of the "ezsmtp" class and replace the corresponding file in your installation in order to use an SMTP relay server for mail delivery. This bug will be fixed in the upcoming eZ Publish 4.0.1 release. " (From http://ez.no/doc/ez_publish/technical_manual/4_0/ref...