Tuesday 24 June 2003 8:20:32 am

Hi Karsten,

Thanks for joining the discussion. If I may, I'd like to comment some of your statements.

[quote]
Now, here is my answer to your opening post. First and foremost, I think eZ publish will always be targeted at programmers-at-heart and not at what you could call "WYSIWYG" admins. There are different CMSes for different purposes and this is good. The fact that you have at one point considered modifying eZ publish to be a general purpose CMS shows that it _does_ appeal to you and many others. The open data structure and framework type flexiblity is appealing and encouraging.
[/quote]

Yes, eZPublish has appealed to me. At least inititally.

However, having examined the app more closely these last couple of weeks, I'm having a hard time trying to understand where modifications are appropriate. You have, of course, the layers very close to the surface like the templates and the settings-files. But let's say that I downloaded version 3.0, and found out that creating new content objects was less than intuitive. So I decided to modify the message that appears when I have selected a content class and clicked the "New" button.

Now, had I done that, I'm guessing that my new message would have been overwritten in v. 3.1 where this message has, in fact, been modified to a more userfriendly message. Or wouldn't it?

This is where I tend to loose my grip: which layers can be modified without suffering new-version headaches.

These are of course not valid considarations for WYSIWYG admins, but while I'm at it, I'd like answers to them all the same. :)

[quote]
The fact that you like many others have discovered that in its current form it is not user-friendly for those that come from a non-programming background does not mean that it cannot be at some point in the future.
[/quote]

But don't you agree that the structure upon which the new eZP is built, makes it hard to create a userfriendly interface?

[quote]
However, I'd like to add that for me, I probably would not spend much time in this, as there are easy to use open source CMS out there that probably would appeal to the user group you are referring to.
[/quote]

Any suggestions that I should consider?

[quote]
I believe that one should not try to do all in one. You could start a different project that uses eZ publish as its base and pops user-friendly extensions and wizards on top of that, much like what the Windows GUI was in DOS times [...]
[/quote]

That's sort of what I'm planning to do, but I don't want to program myself away from the possibility of having the kernel and other fundamentals of eZP upgraded. But then there's these darn layers again... :)

- Eirik

Saturday 28 June 2003 8:44:21 am

I understand the initial concern - but I think that it is up to YOU to make templates that your mother understands.

You don't need to let her ever SEE that there is something called a node. Eg. the 'create new class' dropdown - who is to say that you don't replace that with a select box whose content is dependent on the parent node (create new: receipe) ?

I agree that it would be exciting to see an opensource effort that mainly focused on template building with the goal of making a more accessible version of eZPublish.

eZPub is a framework - it's like a new layer between the traditional 'low-level' and 'user-level' layers - and if you get to know it - it could significantly speed up you application development cycle. At least that is why I am investigating it right now :)