Planet eZ publish

˙ǝʞoɾ slooɟ s,lıɹdɐ ʇxǝu ǝɥʇ ʇuǝɯǝldɯı oʇ ʇuɐʍ noʎ ɟı unɟ - sıɥʇ ǝʞıl ƃuıɥʇǝɯos sı ʇlnsǝɹ ǝɥʇ ˙ǝsɹǝʌǝɹ puɐ 'uʍop ǝpısdn ʇxǝʇ sʇnd ʎllɐnʇɔɐ ʇɐɥʇ ʇdıɹɔs ɐ ǝɯ ǝʌɐƃ lɐdoƃ oƃɐ ǝɯıʇ ǝɯos ˙ǝɯıʇ ǝɯos ǝʇınb ɹoɟ ǝpoɔıun puɐ sʇǝs ɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ ɥʇıʍ ƃuıʎɐld uǝǝq ǝʌ,I

The PHP Vikinger unconference, to be held in Skien, Norway on June 21st is now open for registration. You can find the full invitation and announcement here, but I will repeat the highlights.
First of all, this is a free event, but we do require you to register for it to see whether we would have enough space. Places to sleep, and getting to Skien should be arranged by yourself. We made a information page with some suggestions though. The Norwegian PHP User group has reports and videos from last year. The unconference open for all, from beginners to advanced PHP users. At the moment there are about 12 registrations, from people from Norway, Germany, Iceland and the UK. Hope to see you here!
Voici un compte rendu du eZ developer day du 17/04/2008 qui s'est déroulé dans les locaux de Sun Microsystems réunissant une cinquantaine de développeurs intéressé par le CMS eZ Publish . Nous avons tout d'abord eu droit à une première présentation de la stratégie "Open Source" de Sun. Rien de très intéressant techniquement parlant, si ce n'est quelques fonctionnalités avancées d'Open Solaris comme le système de fichiers ZFS ou la solution de virtualisation et une volonté affichée avec l'ouverture de Solaris de concurrencer les distributions Linux autant au niveau professionnel avec des niveaux de support avancés qu'au niveau communautaire.
La suite était heureusement nettement plus intéressante. Comme en octobre dernier Paul Borgermans nous a présenté la roadmap des différents produits eZ (eZ Publish, eZ Components , eZ Flow, eZ Find , ...). Le moins qu'on puisse dire est que de grosses évolutions voire des révolutions sont en marche au moins au niveau d'eZ Publish.
Cette version devrait voir apparaître le très attendu Online Editor basé sur TinyMCE bien plus configurable et souple que l'actuel. La compatibilité avec l'existant sera assuré de manière transparente. Cette version verra aussi le retour de la compatibilité avec Oracle, le support de Solaris 10 ou encore une fonctionnalité d'expiration des mots de passe développé par un partenaire.
Une extension fournissant un flash permettant l'upload massif sera également fournie. La démonstration était vraiment bluffante, ce sera une alternative très intéressante au WebDAV , protocole qui manque cruellement de client fiable en particulier sous Windows.
Cette version verra beaucoup de changements internes selon 2 axes principaux
Le second étant en partie remplie par le premier. en vrac les nouveautés annoncées sont les suivantes :
ouf ! voila déjà une belle et ambitieuse liste rien que pour eZ Publish ! Cette version devrait paraître avant la fin de l'année.
eZ Find 1.1 apportera la recherche par facets dans le courant du second trimestre 2008. La version 2.0 sera une réécriture complète via le composant Search des eZ Components de manière à profiter de l'ensemble des fonctionnalités de Solr .
De nouvelles version d'eZ Flow et d'eZ Components sont annoncées pour la eZ conférence en Norvège au mois de juin . Enfin, eZ Flow 2.0 est également annoncée pour la fin de l'année.
L'après midi s'est terminé par un barcamp axé sur les questions apportées par les différents participants. Chacun a pu échanger sur ses "recettes de cuisine" eZ Publish, je retiens plusieurs points très en vrac :
Bon au final, mon sentiment sur cette après midi fort instructive est que le développement d'eZ Publish tente de combler les lacunes au niveau des (très) gros sites autant en terme de volume qu'en terme de performances.
Last week, I went to the eZSystem's Partner Day which was organized at Apple France headquarters. Vincent Bellissen's first slide was about Snack Culture, a new consumption habit based on bite-sized products. Minimal invest and maximum entertainment. You want to change, you can and it is easy.
A typical example is the success of the iTunes music library : once registered in the iStore, you can buy music files in just few clicks. The Amazon website allows too to buy books or dvds in two clicks maximum (one to login and one to buy).
So the consumption habit has evolved in the way that you can enjoy little part of a product instead of the full product. If we check the ratio part of product / price, we can see that the producer gets always great benefits. It's not new, you may buy a big pot of mayonnaise for 10€ or a tiny one for 3€ but you won't get the third of the big pot. What has changed is the way we can buy it, the product's availability and the way we can use it. You can check your mails while waiting a friend in a bar, watch a movie clip in the tube or even surf the net during a fly.
However, it's a bit threatening. I was thinking that in ten years, children won't read books anymore...
Still digesting this inner revolution, I watched the day after a French movie called “99 Francs”. The story is about a creative publicist who is working in the larger advertisement company in France and who has some issues with girls, drugs, his boss and the whole meaning of his life... I guess it is a good movie and it makes me wonder some things.
Our consumption habits are also enclosed in our today life. We are more receptive to advertisement using some classical symbols and values than original scripts and out of sequence art design. So, if we change the way to consume products by adding mobility and specific parts of products, may be we can break free from this chasm of consumption, classical one.
Moreover, I thought that it might be a catalyst for new shape of art and techniques. With smart phones, we will be able to add high enhanced applications as interactive games, shared software and other funny stuff (video chat or whatever).
So, this is what we do. Causing people to buy our products or our services. We are creating desire around functionalities and freedom for a more or less convinced set of people.
The limit is what we can do to be pertinent : what functionality can I imagine that will be sold in the real life ? The business is restricting the scope of our ability and by this way only focusing on what is really important : users need.
That's why changing our consumption habit may change the way we are doing things. We may experiment some new techniques as the impact on bite-sized consumption is very thin.
It took me fairly long time to figure out what particular tool available from PHP in my custom software and website implementations was missing from eZ Publish... but I finally got it. It's the ability to dynamically, flexibly cache variables, understood as operation or logic results, stored in a reusable form. Naturally, there is no significant need of caching simple variables defined directly within the pagelayout, just like these:
{def $my_var=345}
{def $my_other_var=hash( 'a', '4023' )}
However, it gets worse not being able to cheaply store an array of ten values, whose fetching/generating cost was over fifty or one hundred SQL queries, several files accessed in the file system, etc.
The problem seems quite straightforward - out of many caching techniques and layers in eZ Publish, only two are universally useful: the viewcache and the cache-blocks. Unfortunately, both of them store presentation layer results rather than data, and both are quite independent. As a result:
My idea is a cache layer halfway between logic/data and the presentation layer. It could be a variable-dedicated cache-block equivalent (maybe a var-block?).
Example: Imagine a website that for each of its node views should be able to access both current node data (data map) as well as root node data in order to make some decisions, calculations, etc. Further, the data could be required by at least three of its cache blocks (with different expiry times, expiry rules and "uncomfortable" locations within the pagelayout). Today that sort of combination requires a substantial...
The var-block as I imagine it would have expiry settings similar to cache-blocks: subtree expiry, expiry ignore, expiry time and a flexible key management. In order to prevent frequent file system access, var-block could serialize variable collections rather than just singles. An additional "collection name" parameter could help organize the blocks within the pagelayout.
Please let me know what you think.
Here's the prototype:
http://ez.no/developer/contribs/template_plugins/self_var_cache
Back after a longer while... wasn't on holiday, though ;)
About a week ago, while developing my fifth or tenth extension with its own, custom caching layer, I caught myself trying to clear that cache with eZ standard "Clear cache" button. To none of my surprise, it never worked, but after few attempts I decided to see why ;)
The Fine-grained cache control in the administration interface turned out to be a definition-type of array - easy enough to be made extensible with some effort. Why should a developer be in need of creating custom tools then? Let's hope the team picks up the idea soon:
http://issues.ez.no/IssueView.php?Id=12860&activeItem=3

The PHP Vikinger unconference will be held for the third year in Skien, Norway. Just like previous years it follows directly after eZ Systems conference which puts this year's PHP Vikinger on June 21st, the longest day of the year.
Flickr features some pictures from previous years. And PHP Norge has a report from last year. Let me know (through the e-mail on the PHP Vikinger website) if you're interested, and if you want to suggest topics.
Polish eZ community has met during the first official eZ Developer Day held in the country. Up to thirty people showed up, representing eZ partners, independent developers as well as users, both experienced and potential. Many of the participants were active Polish eZ Community members. eZ Systems was represented by Bård Farstad, co-funder and CTO (Chief Technical Officer) and our native system developer Łukasz Serwatka.
The meeting, which was held in the heart of capital city of Poland, included the introduction to eZ Systems and their flag products, including eZ Flow (both functional and technical demos), the discussion on eZ Publish roadmap and its future releases.
The community had a chance to present their recent implementations as well as share and discuss their problems or requests (I hope we didn't kill Łukasz during this part, as we tried to clear up issues that had been awaiting "closure" for quite some time).
Bård attempted to provoke some community commitment, so that it grows stronger and bigger, but I'm not sure how much response that would get. It got little while there, but there might be some follow-up. Seems like the active will remain active in their ways anyways.
Personally, I am very glad that we had this meeting. Maybe there was too little technical/developer detail, but everyone had an opportunity to bring things up... Maybe it lacked some social part, during which the community would get to know each other little better and discuss things in a more informal, open way. One suggestion though: make that a weekend event because socializing for most people in Poland hardly ever works during the weekdays! ;)
Still trying to find ways to improve eZPublish, I've thought about a simple process to resize pictures without having to download the picture, to resize in whatever image software and then, upload it again in eZPublish.
My aim is resizing and not scaling. It means that we are losing some information by cropping the picture that we are not losing by resizing. I'm just specifying this point because it's not a extension of the image.ini / image_class mechanism, but a new functionality which allow the user to cut himself a square in his picture. I guess a picture of the result is more obvious :
You can download it as usually on ez.no.
It uses a JavaScript library coded by David Spurr and the Scriptaculous library.
Still trying to find ways to improve eZPublish, I've thought about a simple process to resize pictures without having to download the picture, to resize in whatever image software and then, upload it again in eZPublish.
My aim is resizing and not scaling. It means that we are losing some information by cropping the picture that we are not losing by resizing. I'm just specifying this point because it's not a extension of the image.ini / image_class mechanism, but a new functionality which allow the user to cut himself a square in his picture. I guess a picture of the result is more obvious :
You can download it as usually on ez.no.
It uses a JavaScript library coded by David Spurr and the Scriptaculous library.
