Wednesday 14 April 2004 1:06:14 am

Hi Jonathan,

Thank you for very constructive criticism. It is this kind of feedback that help us improve. You do also have many important points.

Usability is one of the highest prioritized parts of our future development, and we admit it has not been that high priority this far in the 3.x development, as general framework development has. Our goal is to make everybody accomplish more, both the ones using the system (editors, wemasters, users) and the ones building the system. We do know there are lots of things we can, and should do here, and we have started the process, both with the admin interface project as you mentioned and by building more tools simplyfying the process of making sites, as you will see from the next 3.4 release with different tools.

With usability we also admit that we can not invent everything ourselves, but look at systems the users are used to and that does this very well, both competitors and others, like windows and Mac.

But I also need to mention one other basic philosophy of our development, which is openness. eZ publish is build following open standards, like XML. It is also a thrue content management system separating design from content. Thus some of the functionlality you mention above we will into implement as standard in eZ publish, like being able to choose fonts and colors in the editor. These features are design and should be controlled by the designers. The largest part of our work with the OE was to remove functionality so we could follow the prinziples of content management and get a clean XML.There are possibilt to integrate such editors into eZ publish, but then you would need to break these prinziples, for example by storing everything in HTML.This does of course make the challenge bigger.

So to conclude, we are focusing on usability, and know there are lots of things we can improve. Our main goal is to have a clean intuitive interface, but still follow the open standards and separation of design and content.And we appreciate such contructive critisism, becaus we acknowledge we are not perfect,and this feedback will help us target what the users want.

Aleksander

Wednesday 14 April 2004 9:35:20 am

Ole and Aleksander -

Thanks for your replies (and quick ones at that).

Let me add some more functionality that I think is a little strange and aren't related to markup but usability to the list:

- when you log into the forums to make a reply, instead of showing me the thread newest to oldest, I only see the original message. Can this be configured, because in a busy forum I don't imagine this works so well.
- you can't keep yourself logged in. I think it would be fantastic if there were a simple cookie set with a "(x) keep me logged in until I log myself out" button in the eZ Publish login form. That might also dramatically improve the stickyness of eZ Publish out of the box, as IME many forums customers are lost on their initial return visit if they have login problems

No, on to open standards. I was very active in an organization called MACCAWS.org for a while, until I realized that web standards already have enough advocates (and I got more experienced using them). I understand that you need code that validates, and that does make eZ Publish more forward thinking than many other commercial CMS systems (though not all). My problem with web standards is that many times, clients (who are just, after 6 years, starting to "figure out this web stuff") are being asked to accept that things don't work the same way that thought they did. For example, we have a client right now who was shocked (SHOCKED!) that I couldn't just center everything in the xhtml template I was showing him and had to "rebuild" the template (well, I do, we all know how hard pixel perfect cross-platform design is in xhtml). The thing is, out of the box, eZ Publish <i>could</i> be a lot friendlier.

Simple things that could be implemented in a couple of minutes, but would make a major difference, would be included custom tags for TM, (C), and (r). Special characters shouldn't be hard to use.

Other things I could think of:

- including a (xhtml compliant, or better, server-side client sniffing) editor for the forums and other content input locations for
- including basic classes in the sample sites (or at <i>least</i> in the OE) that include underlining, strikethrough, and a couple of customizable classes etc
- improving (and this one is a biggy) the process of inserting images... it can't be done from the OE per se (it can, but not in an anything close to intuative way). There needs to be some kind of preview, image options, etc
- Improving the process of assigning page permissions
- Decreasing the page refreshes required to make changes. eZ Publish is hard to use on slow dialup, when you're not in the office
- Improving the page view model, so that you can see your directories and files in an intuative directory tree without having to refresh until you click on something
- Improving the "slickness" of the interface. eZ Publish is like a tugboat in a harbor full of sailboats in terms of it's "schnazziness" and appeal
- Making the shop module configure a little more cleanly for non-European customers (we don't have VAT in the US for example).
- IMPORTANT (I'm on a client call RIGHT this second talking about this (and taking a beating)) -- you should be able to publish pages without them showing up in the navigation. Also, improved support out of the box for press areas...

I do think that modelling eZ after from of the effective content management systems is a good idea. The thing about CMS is that pretty much anything you could do has been done already. and you can learn from other's mistakes. Some CMS vendors have solved it with Flash (which actually is quite a good use of flash IMHO -- hate it for advertising, but for admin interfaces, it can make up for a LOT of the downsides of XHTML). And it can be embedded in standards compliant documents:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay/

Anyways, off track there. Modelling eZ Publish after another successful CMS would dramatically improve the UI.

I would really love to help out in any way I can to make these kinds of changes happen. I know they all seem really basic, but it would make the product a lot more enjoyable to use.

I'm sure there is more I can add, and I could flesh these ideas out to make more sense, but I also have to get back to work. ;-)

That's it!

Jonathan

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