Gadgetopia

eZ publish 4.0 Features List: Here's a fantastic list of new features coming in eZ publish 4. Some great, great stuff.

Blend Interactive is a certified partner of the eZ publish content management system. eZ Systems, the company behind eZ publish, sells commercial support for the system. However, this is sometimes (often, actually) hard to explain to potential customers. It s commercial but it s open-source huh? To try and solve this, we wrote a ...

3.6 / User manual: eZ Systems has published a user-centric manual that explains how non-developers will interact with the system. It's quite good, and if you've ever wanted to absorb the eZ mojo, this is a good place to start. However, remember that this manual covers the default install. eZ ...

If any of you have been dying to hear my voice, you finally have a chance. I recently did a screencast for Packt Publishing on eZ publish, the snazzy open-source content management system. It's a five-minute Flash movie that demonstrates how good eZ publish is at modeling Web content. You ...

eZ components: New competition for Zend PHP Framework: eZ Systems, makers of the ultra-awesome CMS eZ Publish, are expanding their offerings to include PHP components for general (non-CMS) use. This article at SitePoint opines that this is in direct competition to what Zend and Oracle are trying to do. While ...

I was working on a somewhat complex eZ publish-powered site today, and I acknowledged an important point that makes eZ publish -- in my opinion -- perhaps the greatest CMS ever built -- eZ is built around the concept of a "site access." The way the system looks at it, ...

Joe and I have been working with eZ publish for the last few months. It is, without a doubt, the best content management system I've ever used. I got more done in one week with eZ publish than I did in nine months with Documentum. I like it so much, ...

Here's another pattern of content management: content objects have "views." This means that content objects have several predefined ways of being viewed across your system. For example, here are (the) two big ones using an "article" as an example. Individual The view of a single contect object -- how your ...

Me and Joe are featured in eZ publish s Share Magazine for April. They did an interview, and there s a snazzy picture of us. What comes out of the box with eZ Publish is just a starting point. Don’t be afraid to extend the platform, through custom classes, extensions, template operators, ...

I read a great white paper on open-source content management last night called "Content Management Problems and Open Source Solutions." In it, the author examines several different scenarios and profiles over a dozen different open-source content management systems, explaining the key features of each and why it's right for the ...

(Audio is also here. Sorry about the quality I was using a different mic this time, and the input levels were all hosed up.) Navigation is often a pain when it comes to content management. Now, don t confuse navigation with information architecture that grand plan of what ...

A friend and I are looking at a bunch of different content management systems for a church Web site. We've been discussing the merits of the various approaches, and looking at some open source offerings like Mambo, Typo3, and eZ publish. During this, I've struck upon a concept that I ...

When you get neck deep into a content management implementation, you can lose sight of the actual publishing mechanism-- how the content gets from your system to the end user's browser. No matter how sophisticated your CMS is, at some point, a user enters a URL and some content comes ...

At what point does "content management" become "information management"? Put aother way, at what point do you start using a CMS for managing information that's not intended to be published anywhere? We usually look at content management as managing stuff that's going to be published somewhere. But if you have ...

Let me throw out an observation. Your application is worth exponentially more to me if I can write my own user interface for it. No, wait -- that's jumping the gun. Let me back up a bit: Your application is not your user interface. The interface is just a nice, ...

Making Web 2.0 Work For You, Inside and Out The day started with a keynote from a guy from Human Factors International, which is a somewhat legendary usability firm. His talk was dense, but fascinating, so I ll have to dig through the slides later. It was a discussion about ...

Wiki markup has no future: I really agree with this. Even though I love Markdown (indeed, Blend wrote the Markdown extension for eZ publish), there s a large group of users who will never warm up to it and really shouldn t have to. Ok, I m going to confront the elephant in ...

Open-source PHP applications that changed the world: A nice roll-up of the most influential PHP apps of the last 10 years, from phpMyAdmin in 1998 to Magneto last year. From managing databases to shopping, writing blogs to sending emails. Ten years of passion, great software architectures, team work and revolutionary ...

Packt Book Store :: Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management: We've talked about Packt Publishing before, but now it looks like they're really hitting high gear. Here's a book about PHPMyAdmin, which I never thought we'd see but which is badly needed. You may think you know PHPMyAdmin, but if ...

Open Source Receives Royalties Boost: This is an awfully cool thing. Most of Packt's books are on open-source stuff, and a lot of them are on projects for which no other books have been written. Good to see them support the projects which provide them with subjects for their books. ...

Tossing this out for discussion and/or flaming In what order are the top open-source content management systems, from biggest to smallest? Yes, it s vague. By biggest, I mean a back-of-the-napkin estimation of factors like number of installs, number of developers, size of community, magnitude of momentum, strength of buzz, ...

In any content management (or information management) system of sufficient complexity, you will have to interlink records. You will always get to the point where, in the process of editing a record, you will have to specify another record. (Let me note here that the title to this entry is ...

Deane has blogged before on screencasts. We've even done a short cast on ez Publish using Camtasia Studio, which is a great product. But I needed to do a short screencast on how to hook up a VPN with Windows yesterday, and didn't have Camtasia handy, so I went hunting ...

Here's another argument for CSS-based, table-less design that I haven't heard before: by not using tables for layout, then you know that a table is, in fact, a table intended for the display of tabular data. Yesterday, a client of mine wanted to insert a table into the description of ...

A Lexicon for Document Analysis: Here s an analysis that s long overdue just what do you call all the theoretical pieces of content management? What we call a class in eZ publish is a SmartForm in Ektron is a content type in Drupal is a table in a relational database. ...

BuiltWith.com - Web Technology Profiler: This is a very cool idea that isn t quite what I hoped it would be. Web Page Technology Profiler [ ] Find out what a site is built with. You can enter a URL, and it will contact that URL and do some analysis on what ...

I was in Boston on business a couple of weeks ago, and one of the things I did for fun was take the train to Cambridge and walk around the campus of Harvard University. Call me a total dork, but it was amazing to actually be there. (Did you know ...

Word docs from Movable Type: I have to say that Microsoft is doing some great things with the new underlying XML format in Office 2003 and up. Using that functionality, the guys at Movable Type's Pronet published a simple template that outputs Word ML, and thus creates what's essentially a ...

I ve talked a lot over the years about content modeling. Open and Closed Content Management is probably the most self-referenced post on this site. Recently I called content modeling one of the Four Disciplines of Content Management. But, lingering behind all the questions about how to model something is a ...

I have a serious Web development neurosis: I hate querystring arguments. You know the garbage after the page name in a URL? Like this: page.php?thisArgument=thisValue&andThisArgument=thisValue I hate them. I think they're ugly, unweidly, and expose too much of your application to the world. This is an utterly irrational thing, I ...

I spent some time this morning looking at PureEdit. It bills itself as a CMS, which is a classification I don t know that I can agree with completely. For the record, I only watched a couple of screencasts and browsed through some of the code. I don t know if it ...

Making A Better Open Source CMS, by Jeffrey Veen: This is a great article -- a rant, really -- about how much the author thinks the open-source CMS offerings just plain suck. He laments about a lot of things I agree with. The real goldmine, however, are the comments. There ...

I've spent some time today playing with Squarespace, since their ads kept appearing my AdSense. While I try not to get too excited about new things (lest my head explode), I'm going to venture a pretty bold statement -- Squarespace is the best content management system I have ever seen ...

When you're building a big Web app, oftentimes you get to a point when you need to run some asynchronous batch process. You need to do something at, say, 2 a.m. that doesn't involve a request from a browser. I ran into this problem the other day, and I tossed ...

I've Never Met a Boxed CMS I Like: SitePoint has a brutally accurate post about CMSs and making them run actual Web sites. The first issue is that the very nature of a CMS is not easily boxable, without creating an application that tries to do everything for everyone and ...

Here s what I want: a CMS that was truly developed from the API out. If an interface comes with it, great. I might use it, I might not. I ve talked about this before. Last year, I said this: When building a new piece of software, you really need to completely ...

When it comes to content management, custom fields are good -- it's nice to have a place to put things that the developer didn't anticipate. You'd think it would bridge the gap between a "closed" CMS and an "open" CMS (see this post and this post), but it doesn't really. ...

The other day, I was reading the Wikipedia page on McMansions (via Kottke). It was extremely interesting, and it made a good point: The movement of the "atrium concept" home layout from popularity to ubiquity in modern American architecture stems largely from the "Ten Minute House" theory [...] Most realtors ...

One of the things we constantly struggle with at Blend is capacity. I m very blessed to be able to say we have more work that we know what to do with. Every day, new deals just seem to fall from the sky. I hope that doesn t sound arrogant, but it s ...

Here's something not that shocking: the same amount of time spent on different Web development activities can yield vastly different productive results. Put another way: you can spend two hours on Activity A or the same amount of time on Activity B. Does this mean they will both contribute equally ...

Here s something I don t see nearly enough in content management systems: subcontent. This is when a content object contains other content objects as children. I don t think I ve ever built a content-managed site where I haven t (1) used this when it was available, or (2) wished for it when it ...

(Note: the audio for this post is here.) We had a build meeting the other day for a client s site, and we walked through the site map to determine what content types we were going to need to pull this off. In these cases, the first content type you ...

A while back, I mentioned the concept of a "content tree" in regards to content management. I cited this as a "functional pattern" and promised to talk about it more, but I never did. So, here goes -- With every content management system (CMS) I've written, I always get back ...

I got to thinking the other day: exactly when do you have a content management system? We ve all built apps that manage content, but when do you graduate from a relational database with an admin section (RDBWAAS) to the lofty and deserved title of content management system? (Incidentally, I ...

Well, here we are at #4,000. This puts us just 1,000 posts away from our stated goal of 5,000. Along with the 4,000 posts, we have 6,050 comments as of this writing, and that's very cool. We appreciate all the interaction everyone has with the site. Interestingly, we hit 2,500 ...

(Note: this post exists in both written and audio form. They re more or less the same thing, so take your pick. I elaborate a bit more in the audio, since I have a tendency to ramble, but I used the written post as an outline for the audio post, ...