Thursday 22 April 2004 7:56:24 am

I totally agree with Zinistry. Before Dominik answered a huge amount of posts earlier today (great job, BTW!) there were more 0's than other numbers on the forum main page, and this is nothing out of the ordinary.

I think some sort of ranking system is a good idea. Personally, I got a little excited when the community stats page was launched, and I found myself among the top 20 most active forum authors. And there I intend to stay. :)

A simple, yet effective solution might be to display the number of posts by the author in association with each forum post. This would of course increase the load on the template parser, but I think it could be worth it.

Also, the forum traffic might increase now that one has been allowed to post their URLs. Hopefully, developers using the ez platform will wish to expose their knowledge.

Personally, I try to answer the posts again, but of course my activiy varies depending on my work load. Also, there are several posts which I'm simply unable to answer, due to the extend of my knowledge related to ezp. This is where I think the ezp crew should be better at stepping in.

I do realize that ez can spend too much time on this as there's no direct payoff, but they might consider targeting the more advanced users, allowing them to become more knowledgable and in turn, helping those who are less familiar with the ez platform.

Finally, I've also noticed several posts that are left unanswered, either because the initial post is hard to understand, the author has poor english skills, or because the author could easily have figured this out by him-/herself. Though most people of the ez community take pride in providing comprehensive answers, sometimes it might be better with one lines explaining where one can find more information.

Sincerely,

Eirik Johansen
http://www.netmaking.no/

Sincerely,

Eirik Alfstad Johansen
http://www.netmaking.no/

Thursday 22 April 2004 8:34:22 am

I haven't been happy with the situation either, so I spoke with bård from ez about this.

Their plans for the community have been ruined by their workload. In addition to paying customers they trying to get 3.4 out of the door and are fixing lots of bugs. Unfortunately this has resulted in the lack of posts to the forums.

They are aware of this and want to use the conference to turn around this situation. Roadmaps for 3.5 and ez.no will likely be put together as a result of discussions and workshops from the conference.

I hope this helps to fill the knowledge gap a little.

paul

Thursday 22 April 2004 8:49:32 am

Hi,

[irony on]
At the moment, the only way to get in touch with the ez crew is to report a bug ... and because of this, I don't put suggestions in the forum but in the bug report ;-)
[irony off]

Yes, a kind of "FAQ" would be a great idea. Maybe the easiest way to get this work is to extend the "forum message" with keywords which can be only editet by moderators. And the system will find related topics / answers automaticly?

Kind regards,
Emil.

Best wishes,
Georg.

--
http://www.schicksal.com Horoskop website which uses eZ Publish since 2004

Friday 30 April 2004 4:12:52 am

Hi, all!

These forums have been indispensable for me in developing my first ez-publish site. And I know that I too will try to answer questions whenever I have the opportunity.

But it's a fact that we can't dismiss that some people tend to think "what's in it for me?" whenever there's talks about getting things done. So anything to satisfy that question would probably benefit the forums.

The stats page is cool of course, but I felt a bit bad about the other month when I was among the top three for that month. I think at least 80% of my "contributions" were questions and not answers. It didn't feel right to be credited for "nagging" ;-)

Maybe you could get credited more for answers than for questions? Not sure how that could be implemented though, but maybe it could be worth a thought.

Just my two cents.

trondåge

trondåge

Friday 30 April 2004 6:57:12 am

Is it that bad?? I thought the forums were quite good myself! I always seem to get answers :) Mind you I never tend to ask anything too difficult, because I prefer to work it out myself.

I think it's the case (realistically) that nobody is going to go out of their way to figure out the answer to your questions - i.e. if they don't know (because you haven't full explained your problem), or it'd take a long time to explain, they probably won't answer in most forums. I'm not saying there's nothing you can do to improve the forums, but to be honest you'll never get the same level of support from a free forum as you will from paying the ez crew.

~James~

p.s. talking about the quality of forums, it seems kind of ironic that this thread is in the wrong forum :)

Wednesday 05 May 2004 1:20:38 am

Unfortunately, not all questions can be answered all of the time. Moderators are just people who have been on the forums for a long period of time but they cant be here constantly.

I gave a reason for the absence of eZ earlier on this thread which i have decided to accept until the conference, which is only a month away. I very much hope the conference will renew the activity here by eZ. I've been led to believe this will happen.

That said, I find it hard to answer some posts on the forums. It is too often the case that the problem has not been properly described, or the given answer is not understood by the original poster. This mismatch in knowledge is, for me, one of the biggest reasons questions cannot be properly resolved. I see a few ways forward, which i posted as suggestions:

http://ez.no/community/forum/suggestions/troubleshooting_wizard
http://ez.no/community/forum/suggestions/ez_no_template_evaluator

But, so far no one has replied ;)

paul

--
http://www.visionwt.com

Wednesday 05 May 2004 3:58:06 pm

A key question I think needs to be asked is "Is ez Publish actually still getting as many new users as it used to???" The product and community feels like its in decline already.... which I find a bit worrying personally. What are people using instead of ezPublish these days? I havn't kept up with the market much so I'm not up with the play. Is the total implementation of cms's declining or is it just ez? Or am I completely wrong? :-)

I'd suggest the following might help to rectify the forums situation:

1. Three levels of forum membership.
1.1 Basic (like most people now)
1.2 Blogger (the new one)
1.3 Moderator.

Probably once or twice a week I end up hacking ez Publish a bit and adding cool new stuff... like real phpAds integration, a solid bulk mail system etc etc. I don't have the time to document it properly and submit to svn but perhaps if I had the ability to log into my blog, post a paragraph intro, paste in the code and submit... I'd have time to submit all the mods I do to the community. Just an idea... even just a forum dedicated to hacks and mods. Something less formal than the current system.

Another thing with the forums is that the ez Systems guys used to participate a *lot* more.

I'll sum up with this point as I think its by far the most important. The experienced members on the forum (especially myself who selfishly hasn't posted in ages) need to pump up the support a little.

Regards,
Willie

Thursday 06 May 2004 1:16:35 am

Hi Everybody,

Yes, we admit that we have not had too much time to use in the forums. There are mainly two reasons for this, one is the increased demand from larger paying customers and the second is more resources put into eZ publish development. And we admit that these two things have been prioritized, both because we need to make a living and for the best of all of us and for eZ publish, we are running very strict development processes for eZ publish, and don't want to take resources from this development.

But we admit that the community activities are important for the popularity of eZ publish. We know that we need to help you accomplish more. This will improve as we get our new staff onboard and more resources for community activities. I also admit that we will be very busy up until the 3.4 release in beginning of June, but things will improve after that time.

I hope you all can hang in there and help each other, and remember that we still keep an eye on the forum and listen to your feedback and suggestions.

-Aleksander

Saturday 27 November 2004 11:05:20 pm

http://www.ezpub.co.uk/ is one.

Monday 29 November 2004 1:21:54 am

Hi there,

Just wanted to add my view to this discussion, even if its mainly repeating stuff already mentioned.

I find it frustrating I dont have much time to give back to the forum, as its certainly given me a lot of support. This is a simple fact of my first responsibility being with client projects and needing to pay the rent, same as us all.

Comparing against other CMS's, Ez is complex and consequently requires good support to avoid barrier to entry issues, hence a lot of users going down the licenced supporting route. We've been investigating other CMS's, not as a total replacement to Ez, but as an alternative that allows us to get the site a client may want up very quickly in simpler build cases. In this situation Ez will obviously reap revenue benefits from paid support channels, but atrophying the open community is going to reduce the speed of development.

For me it boringly comes down to cash... I'd agree with the view of creating an ExpertExchange / Google Answers system (an extension would be nice ;)) so that members of the community can get answers quicker, and the current altruists can get some financial compensation for their time.

Additionally, this system doesnt have to stop the normal forums which remain free as they are at present. And Ez could look at employing an extra staff member on a support role who'se sole function would be to answer the paid questions and help pay for their presence at Ez headquarters. They could even become profitable with time...

I havent wanted to take out 600 dollars of support with Ez just to get a small but critical question asked. I would be *much* happier to give some of the more verbose posters on the forums a nights worth of beers/dinner out for helping me out with a problem.

Paying $15 for 10 minutes of an experts time is economical for me, and a good hourly rate for the expert.

Regards, Steve.

http://www.oneworldmarket.co.uk