All about the development of eZ Publish by Graham Brookins, 7x (formerly Brookins Consulting) and our think tank kracker.org.
We thought after the exit of eZ Systems from the GPL CMS community that the software (on netgen GitHub) needed a home page website about the software and using it.
I am happy to re-introduce you to https://ezpublishlegacy.se7enx.com
The site is still recovering from data loss and lack of updates.
We hope that the site can be updated soon to improve the quality of the content and it’s relevance.
While this may seem odd when one can simply use a git submodule and git repository to simply manage your extensions on a given eZ Publish installation.
Still thinking about ease of use to the end user, in that vain another functional design target could also go several configuration and build steps further to providing new eZ Publish Installations a more direct build target like building for a new eZ Publish installation with a eZ Webin based design extension package to simplify building new installations without having to know quite so much about version control.
While ezpackage or ezpkg format does provide for debian/ubuntu apt like dependency control of packages. You can always write your documentation to specify installing ezwebin package before installing your own dependent package(s) or you could go further without ezsystems help and build a slightly more complicated package that installs your extension and also requires the expected ezwebin dependencies and thus simplify the end user installation process of selecting a default design upon a new default installation to a single simple choice.
In 2007 Brookins Consulting created the gourgous, ground breakin, free software site design package called Orange Delight for eZ Publish and won the eZ Publish Design Contest prize a RED iPod Nano. The only design contest ever! This package depends upon your eZ Publish website be installed and configured properly before you attempt to install this css only design.
Looking around at the top eZ Publish website's ezinfo/about (site version information) pages details it’s clear to see that most of the site's are running the last eZ Systems release or the latest new Netgen GitHub version.
Well it seems that without a version scheme to work any longer as this requires things funding brings to a project such as planning and release numbers, instead we all run the latest eZ Publish GitHub From Netgen which does not presently increment the version number to indicate a release number.
Cool people run eZ Publish 5.99.99alpha1 and just keep building killer web apps!
Do you think that the time has come for eZ Publish‘s default design eZ Webin to be redesigned to be responsive to make our websites in 2023 share a more mobile friendly design experience by default?
Another pressing challenge is updating the admin design to be more mobile friendly. Even osCommerce admin looks brilliant in a mobile phone.
Or why I used eZ Publish for this blog. I think Wordpress is a great tool who’s developing solid toolsets for blogging and basic pages.
That said my website was built with eZ Publish which comes with the basic templates for blogging that for me at the time were more than adequate for my basic blogging needs. Also I get the full power of eZ Publish with each blog post I publish.
With all the AI plugins for Wordpress being developed how long till the tables turn?
The first thing we see customers do first when they start an eZ Publish website is Googling to see what their search results look like. This is why we build and maintain our own tool chain for Google Search Console Sitemaps and Google Analytics.
For all new websites we build we include BC Google Sitemaps and BC Website Statistics which work perfectly today with eZ Publish multi site configurations.
Give our tools a try you will save time and increase your return on investment.
I recently updated the logo and design styles to give this website a updated look ready for today’s mobile browsers.
Update: The header and menus have been replaced with a more modern design. Try it and leave a comment below.
I use BC Google Sitemaps extension for eZ Publish to generate my website’s sitemap.xml which is regularly updated by cronjob every hour.
The cronjob script is always awaiting new content to generate and tell google there are new pages of this blog ready for indexing and serving.
This way I can focus on my core blog content creation with out needing to worry about adoption.
Recently in preparation for the publishing of this blog I used an newer feature of the extension BC Generate Static Cache to by way of ini settings override exclude by parent node id the blog and this ensured static cache was not generated for this blog and it’s blog posts.
What is static cache? Well static cache is a thin layer of html pages served by web server rewrite rules bypassing php entirely thus speeding up the serving of web pages. With the BC Generate Static Cache extension command line script I can generate the whole static cache in just seconds.
Without static cache we are afforded faster updates to the blog itself and anonymous comments.
This feature worked great and my blog content is served now by php cache which is more than fast enough for this small blog's content.
If you have thought of speeding up your own website try static cache. Static cache works well with stable websites of all sizes and shapes.
Since static cache is simple to bypass for those who know using view parameters I try to enable it on all my eZ Publish websites in production.
What do you think? Static cache vs reverse proxy which is faster?
Hello Internet!
For those of you wondering what happened to eZpedia.org.
Well the sad news is we lost funding for the domain and decided to relocate the site to keep it online and available to developers and users of eZ Publish.
Visit eZpedia at it’s new home at: https://ezpedia.se7enx.com
Several years ago I helped turn all project.ez.no project repositories and downloads into GitHub repositories so the code would live on long after the site had been removed.
This repository listing is great for finding ideas for your own needs from repositories that before had not transitioned to GitHub.
Another helpful mirror is a point in time fork of just about everything ezpublish related including all extensions on GitHub just before the discontinuation of eZ Systems Support and Development of eZ Publish. This includes the most active and popular of the eZ Publish Extensions on GitHub.
Recently in May of 2023 Ibexa took down the eZ Publish documentation website without notice.
Fortunately the way back machine has a working mirror.
The next question on our minds is how long packages.ez.no has to last?
For the more bold we did take a httrack mirror of the doc website resources and stored the results on GitHub.
Update: Ibexa partner mugo.ca published a solid mirror of the documentation. Mugo has plans for the site and plans to host it indefinitely.
7x is distributing PHP 8.x Support for eZ Publish Legacy on GitHub!
This year I’ve done an incredible amount of work bringing php 8.2 support to the netgen repository.
That said, now the whole world can run ezpublish on the latest versions of php.
This repository can be installed using composer! Checkout the packagist!
If your like me still hosting and developing eZ Publish today I strongly recommend you upgrade to the latest version of 7x eZ Publish!
There are a few work arounds and remaining issues but overall it is a great success.
Hello Internet!
My name is Graham Brookins and I do a lot of ezpublish development for customers world wide.
I worked closely with eZ Systems and many others in the eZ Publish community. I have over 20 years experience with eZ Publish Development and Support.
Today I have decided to share a bit more with the community.
This is just a first post with many more to follow.
Follow me and my developments on GitHub.
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