Goodbye Zikula - or how I stopped worrying and started to love eZ Publish

2010-08-06 10:13 am

Olaf F

When I switched to a job in the education industry here in Taiwan in 2002, I found our department website to be a few HTML pages in Chinese created by two students. I thought we could do better and looked around for suitable software - and found Postnuke in the end. I really liked it, because it allowed me to create a whole portal, have user groups with different access permissions etc.

One thing I did not quite like was the language sector. Postnuke ran on 8859-1 by default, the MySQL collation was Swedish IIRC and there was no Chinese language pack. But while there had never been official support for Unicode, some people in the community who needed true i18n always found a way to get it set up.

After a few years though it was a bit embarrassing to see all kinds of other CMS use UTF-8 as default encoding, while the Postnuke devs always came up with plenty of reasons why this was not possible in Postnuke. I was in the Postnuke language team then, and while the devs only expected us to churn out translations, we also tried to get a better language system implemented.

Those attempts were not very successful. Most Postnuke devs could not understand that we may be able to widen the translator base if people would not need to work with raw language define files, where an accidentally deleted apostrophe meant rien ne va plus. A really bad setback was 0.76, where devs had singled out prepositions. They had probably thought of code reuse, functions that you can call from anywhere in your program. Just bad that human language does not work that way, especially when it only knows postpositions. (Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese, and partly Chinese)

The big surprise came in 2008, when instead of the stable Postnuke 0.8 there suddenly was a Zikula 1.0. Quite a few users had left then already, for a number of reasons. I also struggled: Instead of fixing a problem in a version, devs would fix it in the next version and ask you to upgrade - which broke some of your modules. It was not funny, but I decided to stay.

With the new name came a new structure. Now there was a steering committee and there was a group of core devs, nothing else. No design group, no linguistic team, nothing. You were a core dev or you obviously did not contribute anything. Some developers took this view pretty serious, so you better did not ask for improvements as a plain user. But improvements were needed.

With the new name, there was also new terminology. Zikula was now a "framework", and some devs would emphasize that it is not a CMS any longer. Unfortunately, a framework is something for developers, not for users. I was a user, and I felt the results. A popular example among users was putting an image into an article. Easy, you say? Not on Zikula. There were several ways to get this done, none of them trivial, none of them comfortable.

It is ironic that right when the features that I had lobbied for for about six years (gettext, a useful translation portal... Unicode had been done shortly before.) were finally going to be implemented I went away. It had not been easy to use Zikula, with all the broken things, annoyances like the image problem, users being ignored by devs, but the final drop was when on a dev mailing list user frustration suddenly exploded into a thread where users started posting the problems they had with Zikula - for which a core dev called them trolls.

In his eyes, users did not contribute anything, otherwise they would be core devs, they only annoyed him if they did not shut up. That dev was also on the steering committee and I did not see any apology from him or other devs. Instead, my posting asking him if he was indeed serious with that statement and whether he would like to think that over once more was deleted, so I suppose that was the official Zikula line.

The good thing with open source software is that one can easily fork from a project if it does not go the way one hoped. People have done this very often in the last years. This is not 2002, when there were only a hand full of open source CMS/portals. This is 2010, and there are at least 135 such software packages now. It is not necessary to be insulted to use a CMS. Use a different one. And I did.

I already switched the restaurant site a while ago, now mine is done. Of course, eZ Publish is not perfect, otherwise they could halt development right now. It is also a bit difficult to understand in the beginning and there are easier ways to get a site up and running, but eZ Publish does what I need. (Which includes inserting images into articles...) And if you are a current/former Zikula user and you too are thinking about switching, I wrote an article comparing a few systems from the view of a Zikula user: