The eZ Publish Learning Mountain

The eZ Publish project itself is progressing at the speed of the internet. And the body of documentation is growing. So far, each new addition, simply compounds the problem of lack of organization within the documentation. For a new potential end user who just needs to know how to do the simplest of procedures, eZ remains opaque into 2009.

Developers Read the Code

And developers who have read the code, understand the project from an entirely different perspective than end users who newly stumble upon the project. Developers, after a little digging, love eZ Publish! Developers without the time to dig, and end users, continue their search for the best CMS, looking all over the internet for just a workable solution to their requirement. And probably they will settle on something much less powerful and useful than eZ Publish.

Developers apparently were tasked with writing the eZ documentation. They write from their perspective. They know the power of eZ and are excited to tell all the ways eZ is superior to other solutions. They understand and relate concepts and theory that are important to developers, but drown end users. They quite simply know too much about the inner workings of eZ and web development in general, to dialog with meaningful perspective to a potential new end user of the system.

Tons of information is great, but even power searching shows too much theory and not enough real world. When I, as a new user, want to know how to perform one simple discreet operation, where do I look? Popularity and Google are problematic. Too much chaff and information overload.

Real World Requirement

Today, I have a client who wants pdf files on their site for download. The old way before eZ Publish..

• make a folder
• serve the pdf file from that folder
• write a full http://<> link pointing to the download location.

Where and how would eZ developers store and serve those pdf files? I have read enough of the documentation to believe that the files should reside somewhere in the /var folder structure. And I kind of recall that there is a way to reference files in /var without requiring the http://<site> part of the link. It should be possible, since eZ regularly accesses files in /var to present them on the web.

Begin the Search

Is this information somewhere in the 1880 pages of the eZ Publish 4.0 technical manual? Just the table of contents is 14 pages, and no real hint of where to start from toc or searching the pdf. Storage in section 2.2.1 looks promising, nice overview page. Then quickly deteriorates into theory instead of practicality. I do not want all the theory, I just want to know where to put my pdf file and how to access it online.

Will I find this somewhere in the 90 pages of the eZ Publish 4.0 user manual? And what defines the difference between the technical manual and the user manual? Which do I read for what?

Will I find the required info in one of the manuals for the eZ Flow extension? There I discover, in the Setup manual, the long lost reference to fetch functions I remembered seeing once upon a time.

EEE!!!

eZ Publish is using the classic Redmond principle of EEE on themselves. Make it so all fired confusing that people will throw up their hands and move on, or better yet, hire an expert to do it for them.

It need not be this difficult. eZ is aware of, and trying to correct the problem. But IMHO they already have too much of a developer community, and not enough of a simple real world user community in place. As a simple real world user, go to ez.no and tell me where you will start. Their site is the wrong place for that community. It becomes too much all in one place, yet scattered all over that one place. Just like the current state of the documentation. Ok, give up on eZ docs, no worse than most open source projects. Time to go to google, the perennial source for open source documentation that reaches beyond the source code.

Google search

eZ Publish + pdf files + storing

Result1, a chance to buy a book. As a new user, I don't even know if I can use eZ yet, why would I want to buy a book on it? And as a seasoned open source user, I know that the book is out of date as soon as it is written, just like all other fast paced open source projects. Buy the book when you have time to read history.

Result 4 http://www.sitepoint.com/article/build-intranet-ez-publish/ article from the master himself, on how to use webDAV for storing and indexing pdf files. Way cool, way more than I need, or need to know. I know enough to know I do not want to set up webDAV just for this.

Result 10 http://suffandnonsense.blogspot.com/2008/10/10-tips-for-new-ez-publish-developers.html Very nice information, of course from a developer standpoint, and no help with my urgent problem today. A pattern is emerging and I am out of time.

Give Up.

It is so blazing difficult to find the anwer, I will just do it the old fashioned way. I am out of time, shaking my head and muttering, why can't it be eZ?

Update - it is easy, the capability is built in to the OE - the online editor, with one additional tweak required.

http://webportalmaster.com/index.php/eng/ez/HowTo/Make-PDF-Files-available-for-site-visitors

Tomorrow

Tomorrow, i have a client who wants to include social plugins, like this..http://www.bin-co.com/blog/2009/03/adding-social-bookmarking-button-in-wordpress-without-plugins/, within an eZ publish blog template. Where do I start?

Must I dig through the theory of templates and overrides and all the rest, written with a developer mindset? If I had not already been through the other possibilities for CMS, I would be ready to try something else. But I know everything else will eventually fall short in one respect or another. eZ always has the answer for every CMS need, the difficulty is finding that answer.