Thursday 29 May 2003 11:23:56 pm

I think a specific IDE for eZ is a tough one as most people will use an IDE they are confortable with on the platform and GUI they like.

Now a plugin for IDEs like Eclipse etc would be very nice.

Tony Wood : twitter.com/tonywood
Vision with Technology
Experts in eZ Publish consulting & development

Power to the Editor!

Free eZ Training : http://www.VisionWT.com/training
eZ Future Podcast : http://www.VisionWT.com/eZ-Future

Friday 30 May 2003 3:22:04 am

Eclipse is good but I'm not really talking about a text editor - rather a drag and drop designer for templates. Sounds like a tall order I know but theoretically it should be possible and someone who knows they way around Python / wxWindows should be able to put it together fairly quickly. Using SOAP you might even be able to query the eZ publish database for building templates for specific content classes.

This month's edition of php-magazin (German edition) reviewed eZ publish ( "http://www.entwickler.com/itr/online_artikel/psecom,id,360,nodeid,62.html" ) - some good criticism both for and against. They argue that the template system, as is, won't be "friendly" for designers and I have to agree. A WYSIWYG editor would be a big plus and probably something people would be very willing to pay for.

One other thing; it might be worth checking out what Alan Knowles is doing with PEAR::HTML_Template_Flexy (http://pear.php.net/package-info.php?pacid=111) - a very promising template system IMO. He's using the PHP tokenizer extension and has basically written a lexer for HTML. Apart from being very fast, the advantage of this system, IMO, is it can be used in a way that doesn't require learning of a complex template syntax (even though it supports { } type markup), as HTML elements in a template can be assigned special attributes to make HTML_Template_Flexy "bind" them to a PHP class. One example that suggests this is: http://devel.akbkhome.com/peardoc2/package.html.html-template-flexy.attribute.select.html. What this means is developing a WYSIWYG template editor is alot easier, as you really only need to support HTML markup. Flexy could also be used to parse ASP.NET templates eventually - that may not sound interesting but Web Matrix (http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/default.aspx?tabIndex=4&tabId=46) is a great tool for designers.

Anyway - just ideas.

Saturday 31 May 2003 6:54:15 am

The online editor function is great but to charge for it?

I dont think thats a good idea. If users can find cms platforms that offers this functions for free they will not even try ez publish. And that woulde be a shame because ez platforms strength is more or less directly proportional to the size of its user community.

I think it woulde be better to charge for addons that are focused on business users. Business users will pay for addons if they can see how it will help them to profit. Exemple of business addons are extended handling of products and CRM functions.