Stuff and Content

I'm currently working on a multilingual site and had to use the name of the siteaccess in the template code. Easy I thought...well it took quite a while to find. From http://ez.no/doc/ez_publish/technical_manual/4_0/templates/the_pagelayout/variables_in_pagelayout Variable Type Description $access_type array The name of the siteaccess (as "name") and the ID number (as "type") of the access method that was used (1=URL, 2=Host, 3=Port). Adding {$access_type|attribute(show,2)} to the pagelayout.tpl template will give the following: name string 'ezwebin_site' type integer 2 The siteaccess used to serve the current page is accessible via $access_type.name

Some days I absolutely love the internet and the possibilities it enables. Today I got a real buzz when I leaned that Clochix has created a French version of my previous post, " 10 Tips for New eZ Publish Developers ". It doesn't appear to be a straight translation and contains additional thoughts on most of the points. What Clochix does point out is that many of the tips could apply to most applications, and he's 100% correct on this. Many of them are common sense. Trouble is that time and time again I've see projects (and not just eZ projects ) that don't "follow the rules". Sometimes it's good not to assume that people know and to state the basics!

We've all been there, starting out with a new product and not knowing where to begin. Below are my top 10 tips for new eZ publish developers. Read the install documents and make sure your system meets the requirements before beginning. eZ Publish has some hefty needs in terms of memory limits and timeouts that may not be set at recommended levels in some PHP setups. Not having these values set to acceptable levels will impact on a successful install. Don't modify the core distribution . Just don't, no matter how tempting it is. There is no need to modify any files that come as part of the eZ Publish distribution. This will save you losing any changes when you upgrade. Understand the basics . eZ Publish doesn't store content in straight database tables like other Content Management Systems. Read the documentation and understand the content model . eZ Publish is all about content objects arranged in a tree , not data stored in tables. Debugging holds the answers .

I'm been meaning to attend a Web Directions Conference since they started but it always clashed with other commitments. This year I made the trip to Sydney for Web Directions South 08 and it was well worth it. Web Directions always provides a great program of both international and local speakers as well as a fantastic bunch of attendees. As with most conferences there were a number of parallel sessions and often the choice of which to attend is difficult. On the first day I attended mostly technical sessions, which in retrospect was probably a mistake. This is a run down on the sessions I attended on day one. New media - new business Lynne D Johnson presented the opening keynote which covered how various generations interact with of new technologies and what this means for traditional media providers. The content of the session was perhaps aimed at a less "online" savvy crowd but got interesting when examples and case studies came out. Some interesting ideas wher

Revision control systems (RCS) play an essential part of any software development process. One reason for using a RCS is to enable applications to be rolled back and deployed from a known point in time. Due to the nature of eZ publish it's difficult to capture all changes in the RCS and this often leads to the requirement of manual adjustments when changes are deployed. An eZ publish project is made up of a number of elements that are stored either on the file system or in the database. The database not only stores the site's content but also a number of "configuration " items, such as roles & policies, content class & workflow definitions, RSS feed configurations and URL translations (I'm sure there are more). Another scenario where this feature will pose an issue is if you use a node override to utilise a specific template for a particular node. In this case the entry in override.ini relies on a specific node_id to link the template to the node. It