Not only the creation of “internal drafts” bothers me when you have collaborative solutions built on eZ publish, also the ability to quickly change some attributes on one or more objects is more than desirable. Ajax may be part of the solution, provided some security can be implemented. This post essentially outlines an extension architecture [...]

Not only the creation of “internal drafts” bothers me when you have collaborative solutions built on eZ publish, also the ability to quickly change some attributes on one or more objects is more than desirable. Ajax may be part of the solution, provided some security can be implemented. This post essentially outlines an extension architecture [...]

While the standard eZ publish distribution already provides quite some functionality, a few features are missing to make it really “enterprise ready”. As our needs are a web based CMS to support all operational management, knowledge management and ISO 9000 requirements, a powerful set of features has been added by our [...]

While the standard eZ publish distribution already provides quite some functionality, a few features are missing to make it really “enterprise ready”. As our needs are a web based CMS to support all operational management, knowledge management and ISO 9000 requirements, a powerful set of features has been added by our [...]

At Christmas day, I've announced that I was planning to hack the eZ publish kernel to allow the use of custom functions for policy limitations. Today I've committed an initial version of this hack to the community SVN repository.

PHPMac.com has two more new PHP tutorails today - Navigation using Switch and Single-Page Password Protection.

In the navigation tutorial, they show you a simpel way to use the switch() control to display different content based on a variable set in the $_GET array (URL string).

The second tutorial, Single-Page Password Protection, shows you quickly how to create a form that takes in a password and checks it against one hard-coded into the PHP script. If it validates, the "secret content" is shown.

Both of these tutorials are very simple, and, if you're not careful with them, could cause some security issues with your scripts. All in all, though, they're a good starting place...

Looking at http://blog.coomanskristof.be/2005/12/25/planning-a-customcheck-policy-limitation-hack/ I figured that Kristof is basically doing the hook where I could plug my own datatype in, without further kernel hackery. So let's hope he really does this ;) Turns out he sees some issues with policing read access due to the way how it is currently handled. A deep look at the code will be necessary I believe.

In this post from digg.com today, there's a pointer to this tutorial from Icemelon.com today about creating dynamic images in PHP.

If you frequent forums, you'd probably remember images in people's signatures that would display information about your computer. Such mysticism! This tutorial will teach you that, and more!

They show you step by step how to use the GD extension in PHP to update a pre-existing image (a PNG in this case) with the viewer's IP address dynamically. It's just a small bit of what you can do with GD, but it's a good introduction to what it looks like...

Over on PHPMac.com today, there's two new beginner tutorials posted - an Introduction to PHP and Writing Form Data to a MySQL Database using PHP.

The intro tutorial starts at the very beginning, showing you how to put PHP code in your HTML pages. They show how to use variables and echo statement to make some simple output.

In the MySQL/Form tutorial, they assume that you have a bit of experience with PHP under your belt (though it's nothing a little searching through the manual couldn't fix). They create a form/script combo that checks to make sure you've entered in information and then, on submit, creates the correct SQL to put it into the database.

Neither of them include anything on installation, so you'll have to either set it up yourself or have a host that already has it installed to work on - though it's pretty easy to find those these days...

While the ezpublish permission system is quite flexible from an admin's point of view, it leaves a lot to be desired from an user's point of view. For example, a user can't decide himself (not easily, anyway) who should be able to read the object he just created. Even in the plain old Unix permission model he gets to chose that (obviously root can override that, but administrators are 1:1 the same in ezpublish) up to a certain extent. Thus my desire to give this flexibility to users on an on off basis (obviously, in some cases you don't want to allow them this power, most likely when you're using approve workflows and things like that). After thinking about it for a while, I've decided that shoehorning a good model into the current permission system (like I did with ParentOwner which is comparably trivial) would be really really ugly and rather inflexible to boot. I then laid this to rest somewhere in the back of my mind until my interest in this got resparked when I read http://ez.no/community/forum/setup_design/make_robust_to_using_back_button_rather_than_cancel#msg90419 (the beginning of the discussion isn't quite related to this, but in the end it quickly converges towards this, in my mind anyway). When I first thought of this I figured that using sections in a clever way would work (and most likely it would, for simple private/public features) but after some thinking I've decided against that. At some point it dawned upon me that a custom ACL datatype would be perfect for this, the only change in the kernel would then be a hack to recognize this datatype and let it override some of the permissions if it exists in an object! Since the architecture is very flexible this way, I've been thinking that first I need to get the code stub to interface with the datatype into the kernel, after which the datatype can gradually be extended (obviously starting with a binary private/public option for reading, then writing, then adding something more like ACLs, possibly even groups).