2008 recap

2008 saw widespread adoption of the eZ Publish 4 series, as well as the continued evolution of eZ Flow, eZ Find, eZ Newsletter, and eZ Components. More and more enterprise-level sites, especially media sites, made eZ Publish their platform of choice. Support and service product eZ Publish Premium was simplified and streamlined, the eZ Partner program was updated, and the ez.no website got a well-received restructuring. Active forums, almost 230 eZ Partners, and ground-breaking projects and code contributions mean that the eZ Ecosystem is more vibrant than ever.

February

February saw the release of the first issue of SHARE! magazine, which is a monthly newsletter available as a PDF. It features interviews, stories, reviews, and news related to eZ Systems, eZ Partners, the general eZ community, and content editors and managers everywhere.

April

April was definitely packed with eZ Ecosystem events. We held two eZ Publish Developer Days – one in Paris, France and the other in Warsaw, Poland. It was the second ever Developer Day in Paris and the inaugural one in Poland. Both events were a great success with over 100 attendees. It was great opportunity for contributors, partners, and the eZ Crew to come together and exchange experiences.
The eZ Press released a Spanish translation of the eZ Publish Basics book as a PDF. This was made possible by support and monetary contributions through Open Funding. eZ Publish Basics was written for developers and administrators who want to expand their understanding of eZ Publish or who want to extend and customize their eZ Publish installation.

May

May was a "new releases" month. The first stable version of the eZ Survey extension was released, as well as beta versions of the eZ Publish Online Editor and eZ Newsletter. eZ Survey was the first successful development project from Open Funding.

June

June was a very eventful month at eZ, as always!

The Norwegian Minister of Trade formally opened the new eZ Headquarters at Klosterøya in Skien, Norway on June 16, marking the start of the week of eZ Conference 2008. This year, the conference was part of the Open Nordic Conference 2008, a joint effort with ICT Norway, National Center for Open Source and ICT Grenland to run three different, but still very related conferences in parallel. eZ Conference, eZ Awards and eZ Publish Developer Day events held in Skien were attended by close to 500 attendees from around the world. Among the winners at the eZ Awards were Piotr Karas for community member of the year, and Gala.fr for site of the year.
During eZ Conference, we released eZ Components 2008.1 (which included the new Document, Feed, and Search components) and announced official support for the Sun Solaris 10 operating system and Oracle DB starting with the upcoming eZ Publish 4.1. Also, the eZ Press published the book eZ Publish Advanced Content Management, building on the concepts from eZ Publish Content Management Basics to address the needs of content managers and webmasters and provide a comprehensive advanced guide to managing content with eZ Publish.

To top it all off, eZ Publish reached the 2.5 million total download mark in June.

August

New maintenance versions were released for eZ Publish: versions 4.0.1, 3.10.1, and 3.9.5. These releases included a large number of fixes (about 310 for version 4.0.1).
The ez.no website was retooled for an improved user experience. eZ focused on optimizing the navigation structure so that visitors can get the information they need as easily as possible. For the design aspect, eZ teamed up with eZ Partner OneZero to produce a clean, relevant layout.

September

With a 583% growth in new subscription sales and a renewal rate above 90% for the first half of 2008, eZ announced that it had achieved two straight profitable quarters, proving its Enterprise Open Source business model.
On ez.no, we launched a series of interviews with eZ Crew members. This series kicked off with long-time eZ developer Gunnstein Lye, who has travelled around the world working on eZ Publish projects.

Also in September, a third Developer Day in Paris was organized.

October

In October, eZ Systems and Apple started a roadshow in several different European countries to introduce an eZ Publish / Final Cut integration. Broadcasters, publishers or any existing users of Final Cut technology can now directly publish their videos with eZ Flow.

November

eZ Systems and eZ Partner Mitsue-Links Co., Ltd. joined forces to found eZ Systems Japan in Shinjyuku-ku, Tokyo. The primary purpose of this new office is to promote eZ Publish in Japan.
The biggest development news in November was the first alpha release of eZ Find 2.0. This version carries a bunch of new features such as support for facets (to build drill down navigation interfaces when searching) and tuning of relevance through classes, attributes, datatypes and number of reverse relations (similar to Google's pagerank).

December

Last month, we released a PDF version of the eZ Publish Advanced Content Management book, available through our online store.
The eZ Partner program saw its first Platinum eZ Partner: Netmaking AS. Netmaking has been working with eZ Publish for almost 6 years and recently attained the highest eZ Partner level possible.
To cap off 2008, we released eZ Publish 4.1.0alpha. The eZ Publish kernel carries a few important new features, around 80 new enhancements, and 400 bug fixes since 4.0.0. Together with this release, several extensions are now available (through projects.ez.no), which substantially enhance the usability of eZ Publish:

• Password Expiration (based on work by our partners Microblau & Mitsue Links)
• eZ Multiupload
• eZ Publish Extension for Oracle Database

What's new in 2009

To ring in 2009, eZ Components 2008.2 has been released. The main new development of the eZ Components 2008.2 release is the MvcTools component. The MvcTools component implements the tools for a framework. Instead of dedicating the structure of the application, it provides a dispatcher, two request parsers (one for HTTP and one for email messages through the existing Mail component), two routing methods, two view handlers (one through plain PHP scripts and one through the Template component), and a response writer for HTTP.

Document and Webdav are two of the main components that were improved in this release.

Webdav component highlights:

• Added support for authentication and authorization
• Added support for integrating authentication mechanisms with existing systems
• Added support for shared and exclusive write locks

Document component highlights:

• Added conversion support for three different wiki formats (Confluence, Creole and DokuWiki)
• Added support for eZ Publish XML formats
• Added read support for XHTML and write support for ReST

More information about eZ Components 2008.2 can be found in the official release announcement.

eZ will continue to build momentum through 2009. For example, everybody is invited to the free " Enterprise PHP Framework Conference" in Barcelona at the end of January.

Do you have news to share with the eZ community? A conference presentation, an article, an interesting new site or a helpful blog post? Send it along to community-newsletter@ez.no and we'll include it in the newsletter. Share your information!

Forum Watch

• A solution for running cronjobs.php with parameters in limited environments
• Some useful information for eZ Publish 4.1 testers
• A solution on how to reset the admin password
• Question about the source code of projects.ez.no
• A solution for “external link icons”
• A solution for adding hidden fields to information collector forms

News this week

• New Silver, Gold and Platinum Partners
• New Partners from December 2008
• Partner recognition - Share your pipeline
• New eZ Components release
• eZ will be attending IFRA's CMS workshop

Reported issues

eZ Publish - Bugs

• New - Unable to correctly create workflows rules under SSLZones
• New - Utf-8 charachers not displayed correctly in ezxmltext fields
• Assigned - [TreeMenu] AutoopenCurrentNode does not work in browse mode
• New - Role count might be unconsistent on role/list view
• New - content import: always must create version 1
• New - Extension settings don't override as expected when the extension is per-siteaccess activated
• New - Inconsistent behaviour in titles/names of Folders and Articles
• New - Package fails to import Matrix columns
• Closed - create_languages.tpl breaks admin interface html page
• New - eZTemplateCacheFunction::processCached has twice the parameter $subtreeExpiry
• New - Missing tooltip
• New - search: debug output / warnings for temp tables

eZ Components - Bugs

• Closed - Impossible to set PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY with ezcDbHandler
• New - Files in zip file get extracted as empty files
• Closed - UnitTest does not allow execution of single test files any more.
• Feedback - Cannot append email through IMAP
• Closed - Ez find Support for multilanguage characters

eZ Publish - Enhancements

• New - Languages are loaded from database in all pages
• New - Autoload generation: really skip directories instead of omitting files in it
• New - Use the Archive Component in ezodf
• New - Workflow edit template behaviour in a small browser window
• New - allow relationslist definitions to be fixed after package import
• New - unnessecary includes in kernel/role/policyedit.php

eZ Components - Enhancements

• - Addd support for the content-disposition headers in MvcTools