Netgen eZ Publish need’s vendor based default installation campaign today to help vendors improve their own application installation process of the latest version of eZ Publish instead of falsely misleading people into believing that the eZ Publish project or software is a dead app (non functioning).

Short: It doesn’t work yet.

Keep waiting for more official updates and extended support for your distr package manager implementation of all required php extensions.

In one way or another between the two of the flavors of Ubuntu/Debian failed to properly install all the php extensions (php-intl I’m looking at you) required by eZ Publish CMS to run in php 8.3 in 12/2023.

My attempts to install php were package based and dependent on the maintainer to provide full support for the latest distributions of ubuntu / mint. If I would’ve installed from sources, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had as many problems hee hee.

I desperately need to test a full eZ Publish hosting environment running the latest php release to find and fix any compatibility issues and prove it does infact function as desired.

Time now is but an illusion

A word today about the server requirements for an eZ Publish website. They may seem daunting but from years of experience let me assure you they are not in any way.

The most resource intensive part about installing eZ Publish is often the initial installation setup wizard usage to build your installation for the first time. This is where most shared hosting users with limited experience make their biggest mistake, building a eZ Publish website initially on shared hosting, it's often possible but not as pleasant as a box you can control yourself as root. It's better to upload a (mostly) complete built setup ready to run on production.

After which the cost of eZ Publish goes down dramatically and then depends upon the custom features you require for your website.

You'll find, with some work, if the hosting is designed for WordPress, you can alternatively host a complete ready to host eZ Publish on almost any kind of hosting with just enough memory being the key to a fully featured website. I remember hosting eZ Publish v2.x on 486 CPU with less than 256 MB of memory for both OS, Apache Web server and eZ Publish PHP.

With that in mind it is trivial to distribute a completely setup eZ Publish installation to the server hosting your website by transferring the files of eZ Publish and loading your database dump consisting of your setup eZ Publish website structure and content to the website server.

Warning: Skipping the setup wizard can lead to advanced troubleshooting of your web server / PHP environment to ensure the server itself is configured to support the base eZ Publish requirements. Also these lesser hosting packages are often best for hosting production installations of eZ Publish much more than they are suited for active eZ Publish extension or kernel development which is a common pitfall.

A word on cheaper hosting packages: They may be cost effective for production hosting but can be difficult and unstable for development use. This is where the wisdom and foresight of an effective website administrator comes in to leverage each hosting platform for it's advantages and avoid the more painful disadvantages.

Currently, we possess a package server functioning as a meticulously structured repository for various packages. This repository encompasses design extension packages as well as other eZ packages, including functional code packages. As demands persistently emerge, the necessity for a comprehensive, automated solution becomes evident. The envisaged solution aims to streamline the intricate process of transmitting packages to eZ publish installations seamlessly. The envisioned system necessitates the implementation of an automated family of solutions that caters to both client and server facets, eliminating the need for manual interventions. This holistic approach seeks to integrate a user-friendly feature set, allowing for effortless browsing, selection, downloading, and installation of packages.

The advent of this automated family of solutions aims to revolutionize the existing paradigm by offering a turnkey mechanism. This mechanism, when applied, will systematically address the complexities associated with the deployment process on both the client and server sides. By facilitating an automated workflow, users are relieved of the cumbersome task of manual intervention, paving the way for a more efficient and error-free package transmission system. In essence, this transformative approach underscores the commitment to enhancing user experience and optimizing the overall efficiency of eZ publish installations.

Within this framework, the design extension packages and various eZ packages, including functional code packages, find a harmonious integration. The package server serves as the backbone, orchestrating the seamless storage and retrieval of these packages. Furthermore, the envisioned feature set encompasses a sophisticated browse and select functionality, empowering users to navigate through available packages effortlessly. The download and installation processes are intricately woven into this automated tapestry, ensuring a cohesive and user-friendly experience.

The imperative for an automated solution stems from the growing complexities associated with the manual handling of package transmission. The envisaged turnkey system is poised to alleviate these challenges, offering a comprehensive suite of features that spans both client and server functionalities. By addressing the need for automation, this solution not only simplifies the user experience but also enhances the overall efficiency of package management within eZ publish installations. In summary, the journey towards an automated, user-centric package transmission system is guided by the desire to provide a seamless and efficient solution to the evolving needs of eZ publish users.

- The advanced package installation tool simplifies deployment.
- It lays the groundwork for automated CMS updates.
- Enables on-demand updates.
- Facilitates scheduled updates via cronjob scripts.
- Enhances system responsiveness to evolving requirements.
- Marks a significant step toward a fully automated CMS update mechanism.

The introduction of a sophisticated package installation tool not only streamlines the current package deployment process but also lays the foundation for a future characterized by automated updates to the content management system (CMS). This tool acts as a pivotal catalyst, setting the stage for a seamless automation of CMS updates, both on-demand and through meticulously scheduled cronjob scripts. By incorporating this tool into the existing infrastructure, the system gains the capability to effortlessly manage and implement updates, ensuring a dynamic and responsive CMS that can evolve in tandem with evolving requirements. The integration of this installation tool marks a significant stride towards achieving a fully automated and efficient CMS update mechanism.

But you don’t have to worry about it being a problem for your application while Wordpress deploya more automated installations to shared hosting and vps hosting for minimal overhead every night and every day without fail. What kind of world do you wanna live in?

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.

Each copy of eZ Publish provides a module view to display the website software information (including your custom extensions) powering your website. It's called eZ Info and it contains two key views, about and copyright.

This ezinfo/about view's template is very simple to customize to meet your own unique needs and website design.

It is encouraged to share this view of your website in the footer or menus of your website to promote both eZ Publish and Your own custom extensions used to power your website.

Here at 7x we regularly style this view to be simple to read and enjoy looking at and share the link to the view in the footer of the website.

This extra step encourages others to learn more about the software powering your website and helps encourage developers to keep their version of eZ Publish in sync with the latest version from Netgen's GitHub.

Example: (this site)

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.