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Author
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Message
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Willie Seabrook
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Thursday 20 November 2003 3:55:14 am
Is anyone working on improving the workflow system? I've got quite deep into it and it needs huge amount of work to get it usable and solid. Ez? Can we expect some stuff in the next release?
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Bård Farstad
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Thursday 20 November 2003 6:10:17 am
There is not much work beeing done with the workflow system for 3.3. But I think it's already pretty usable. We've set up several sites with workflows, e.g. webshops with payment workflows that handles many orders every day using workflows. However the workflow system requires you to write your own workflow event handlers, you can base these on the examples which comes with the distribution - but in many cases you will need to write your own. We will contiune on improving this system and we will see what we have time for in 3.4. We will very soon start the planning for this release and will keep you updated on what we will focus on. It would be great to get some specific information on what you think needs to be done in the workflow system. --bård
Documentation: http://ez.no/doc
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Paul Forsyth
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Thursday 20 November 2003 11:43:00 am
Workflows do have problems. Our last site couldn't include a simple workflow due to this bug: http://ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/bug_reports/fatal_error_cannot_redeclare_class_when_using_workflow Bård, I believe Willie was speaking about the core workflow functions that the event handlers use. There have been several workflow posts recently discussing the issues, with little or no feedback from eZ. As for 3.4, can you at this stage assign a rough percentage to the effort that will be spent on bug fixes and new features? paul
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Willie Seabrook
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Thursday 20 November 2003 6:33:47 pm
Paul's right Bard.... I, and others, have been hacking away at the workflow system just to get it to show a template on a publish... see all our posts over the last couple of weeks revolving around this. (By the way Paul, I just realised today that I sent you a messed up archive with the wrong version of my edit.php so that might explain why my mods didn't work. ;-) Getting that far into it you find that it is sparsley implemented. I've only gotten pre publish triggers to fully work, and even then I'm not sure that everything is hunky dory under the hood. post publish triggers don't work at all. Same with read. I'm using the latest 3-2-3 or whatever it is too. It could use some work.... I still have to get around to posting my stuff on svn.....
Regards,
Willie
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Bård Farstad
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Friday 21 November 2003 12:09:40 am
Paul, we haven't decided what to do in 3.4, but the development cycle will contain 4 weeks of dedicated testing/fixing bugs for the whole team. Including on person who will follow up the bugs reported from day to day. So we will spend quite some time on following up reported bugs ( much more than we did in this cycle ) We will most likely also spend time for the other developers improving exising functionality, workflows, notifications etc. But this is not decided yet, so I can't give any information about this. We will also inform you ( the community ) about our plan some time before we start, so you can comment and we have the possibility to adjust our plan. And yes, I did not say that the workflows did not have any problems - it obviously has. What I said was that I think it's already quite usable and since we use it on sites where it handles business critical data ( e.g. payment ) I think it was an overstatement to say that it needs a huge ammount of work to be useful at all. But it is workflows on checkout in the shop where we've done most of the testing until now. Content read workflow has also been tested quite some. Those should work pretty well. --bård
Documentation: http://ez.no/doc
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Paul Forsyth
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Friday 21 November 2003 2:41:48 am
Thats good news, bård. Thanks. It wasn't clear how the testing and bug fixes would fit into the revised development cycle, apart from the statement that there would be 'more'. In my view 3.4 should try to improve current features to a level where they work for most users. Users like myself and Willie are trying to use these features in a general way but too often we find they can only be used in a very specific way. Workflows do work but when you try advanced features, or use it in combination with some other features it fails. Webdav does sort of work but when you try to use it an CMS kind of way - versioning a file for example, user authentication - it fails. Notifications work too but need to be extended - I prefer digests but it looks like i can only get one a week. These are some of issues i follow. These will be great features but they need some work. Im sorry if this sounds like complaining but im simply trying to discuss the issues. Its difficult when there are so few responses from eZ these days. paul
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Bård Farstad
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Friday 21 November 2003 3:00:33 am
Paul, you're definetly right on the state of webdav. It needs more work to be fully functional in a CMS environment. Versioning and permissions is definetly important for it to be very useful. I think that improving current functionality is an important thing. Our current plan about 3.4 is to have internal discussion about the features and what we should focus on. We will then come up with a project plan proposal to the community which is open for discussion. We will take into consideration all the feedback we have gotten, browse the suggestions forum, customer feedback, support feedback and try to focus on the things that most people think is important. I don't think it sounds like complaining, it's very valuable feedback! Keep it comming. We will also try to communicate better with the community on design level, e.g. before we start to implement a feature we will post information about what we want to make and how we think it should be made. That way we will get valuable feedback from the community. Cheers, --bård
Documentation: http://ez.no/doc
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