Category Archives: ideato’s

2014: it’s time for a change

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Keep calm and fly to Thailand

I wrote the first post on this blog in 2009. I have to admit that I haven’t been that good at keeping it up to date. But I feel that 2014 is a good number to start with a couple of changes.

The first one I’m going to do is writing more often about my work and my experiences.

The second change is my travel to Thailand. Yes, Thailand. I’m going to be there for nearly three months, working remotely for Ideato.

Roberta, a laptop and a camera will be my partners on this journey.

I’ll get back to you soon.

Symfony CMF Camp 2011

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I will start from the end. Thanks to all the people who were at the SymfonyCMF Camp! 

The two days at the SymfonyCMF Camp 2011 have been productive beyond my expectations! The motivation of the participants and the commitment to grow this project were awsome.

We discussed a lot of issues in these two days. We decided and created the boundaries for the SymfonyCMF growth. We started something that, in our opinion, could help a lot those who develop CMSes for their clients!

The very first day we discussed how to get going with the CMF.
Lukas described the state of the art of the project and told us what the status of the Symfony CMF Bundles was. After that, we listed the most important subjects we would have liked to address during the camp.

We started using the boards to get an idea of what we were talking about and sketched a basic schema of the CMF architecture. Based on that, we decided which were the areas to be developed. David updated the Roadmap wiki page to list all the areas we found https://github.com/symfony-cmf/symfony-cmf/wiki/Roadmap “Phase 2: Implementing”.
  • Administration
  • Asset management
  • Menu and routing managment
  • I18n
  • Security
  • Standard Contents
  • Documentation
  • Page assembly
  • Jackalope implementation for RDBMS
  • “Polish” Jackalope-Jackrabbit implementation
From all these discussions we also managed to create modern artwok! 😉
For each of the above areas we created issues on github https://github.com/symfony-cmf/symfony-cmf/issues . And after all this work we earned a good dinner at Cesenatico (fish and really good desserts… ask Lukas for the latter 😉 ) 

On Saturday morning we shut up and started coding! 😉
Everyone took an issue on github and started working on that. (It felt strange to see people working so hard on a Saturday!)
We spent the whole day coding, committing, discussing, designing, taking decisions and eating gelly bears 🙂 (thanks to Uwe and Johannes!)

In the end, what remains from these two days is that the Symfony CMF project is alive, with a growing community and (too few) developers who are  fully committed to get the project done!
Are you a developer? Have you ever used/written a CMS? Do your clients want a CMS? Have you ever spent a lot of time customizing the CMS you installed to a customer?
If you answered yes to at least one of the above questions, you could be interested in what we are doing ( https://github.com/symfony-cmf  – symfony-cmf-devs@googlegroups.com ) and maybe could contribute to this project!

I’ll end this article in the same way I started it… Thanks to all the people who were at the SymfonyCMF Camp!

eZ Publish 4: Enterprise Web Sites Step-by-Step (revision)

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eZ Publish 4: Enterprise Web Sites Step-by-Step

eZ Publish 4: Enterprise Web Sites Step-by-Step

As I wrote on this blog nearly 2 months ago, I was going to write a revision of the book eZ Publish 4: Enterprise Web Sites Step-by-Step. And here I am!

Before going into the details of this book, I’d like to summarize which are the main topics discussed in it. The first one explains how eZ Publish CMF works; the second one regards the basic activities to get it to behave as we want, and the last (but not least) contains the description of a step-by-step web site development including not only the explanation of the development but also how to tune our server to have better performances when we are dealing with an eZ Publish instance.

Thinking of who this book is for, I belive it should be seen as a reference point for people who are not experienced on working with ez Publish. This is true not only for developers but also for those who will work on websites developed with eZ Publish. So, if you have a client that wants to know more about ez Publish, you should think of suggesting him/her to have a look at eZ Publish 4: Enterprise Web Sites Step-by-Step.

The book has three main areas:

The first 4 chapters talk about the introduction of the CMF (Content Management Framework) and how to set up a working instance on your machine. All the information given in these chapters are reported with examples. So if you are a developer, you have the “real thing” before your eyes, and if you are an end user of the system you can find a lot of pictures of the backend that show you where the information or the functionalities you’re reading of are located.

From the 5th chapter to the 9th, you will find information mostly regarding the developing procedures with eZ Publish, such as creation of extensions, designs, templates, content classes, internationalization of our web site and installation of external systems like a forum. These chapters are useful for developers because they
explains how to build properly an application with eZ Publish. This means that they report best practices with eZ Publish and suggestion on how to design the software in the “eZ Publish” way.

The last section regards the configuration of the system you built thanks to eZ Publish (and your work 😉 ). Chapter 10 explains how it is possible to set up roles, permissions, policies and workflows for managing user and content of the system form the eZ Publish backend. Chapter 11 and 12 tell to the developers how to configure the cache to speed up performaces and how to deploy an eZ Publish instance on a production server.

Finally there are 3 appendixes about the optimization of eZ Publish instances, the debugging and the best extensions for this CMF. These are quite useful for developers and server administrator to tune the system the right way for making it reliable and fast.

When I finished reading the book I had the feeling that I needed more to have a better understanding of the eZ Publish CMF. I was working with eZ Publish when I started reading the book and I found a lot of useful suggestons in it. However, I would have found it useful to have a second book, if possible with a more detailed explanation on how to extend the CMF so that you can add functionalities when you need them. At the same time, I know that eZ Publish cannot be explaind as a whole in just one book, this is the reason why I think that this book explains quite a lot of the features of this CMF, even if it left you with the need for more 😉