Archive:Zikula IRC Chat Interview

zk-Simon	Sparks: We're very interested in giving you a hand if we can	11:55
Sparks	zk-Simon: So I'd definitely like to document Zikula as much as possible so we can see if this is a good solution.	11:55
zk-Simon	Sparks: I've always been a fan of Fedora too, so I would like to give something back.	11:55
* Sparks brings up his CMS Template		11:56
-!- stickster_afk is now known as stickster		11:57
* stickster puts Rahul's content in F11 Alpha release notes one-sheet page		11:57
zk-Simon	Sparks: would you like me to go through each point in turn?	11:58
Sparks	zk-Simon: Let me ask you a few questions, first, and if you have anything else that I miss to add please let me know.	11:58
zk-Simon	Sparks: ok, shoot :)	11:59
Sparks	stickster: I'm going to finish wiping those pages today.	11:59
stickster	Sparks: That would be super, thanks for helping out with that!	11:59
Sparks	stickster: Good golly... I renamed 48 pages last night.	12:00
Sparks	stickster: That was insane!	12:00
stickster	Awesome	12:00
* stickster wonders if ianweller ever get round to running the wikibot for renaming the stuff in wikirename.git		12:00
Sparks	zk-Simon: Okay, can you give me a brief summary of your CMS, what it is designed to do and why it would be a good choice for Fedora?	12:00
zk-Simon	Sparks: sure, give me a sec	12:01
Sparks	zk-Simon: No problem.	12:01
Sparks	stickster: We need to get ianweller a ticketing system.	12:01
Sparks	:)	12:01
zk-Simon	Sparks: I don't know how much you know about CMS history, but the Zikula project has been around in one form or another since 2001,	12:04
previously as PostNuke. Since the PostNuke days we've completely rewritten the core from the ground up, trying to keep a nice balance
between practicality, performance and good architecture design. There's a strong API, we've had templating for years so output is easily
modified by anyone who k
zk-Simon	Sparks: Many of the things we initially had as a differentiating factor, i.e APIs (most PHP CMSs didn't even have this when PostNuke	12:06
started out), templating and so on are now in every CMS on the market. One thing we have maintained is the security focus, and I think we
have that still over competitors.
Sparks	zk-Simon: Great. I think the first paragraph got cut off. ...modified by anyone who...?	12:07
zk-Simon	Sparks: Now, the obvious competitors that come to mind like Joomla and Drupal will have more modules, we can't claim to have such a large	12:07
backing (though the community is big), but I can honestly say that I have never wanted for a module to build one of my sites - and I must
have built hundreds. We are lucky in that a few super-powerful modules are flexible enough to cover 90% of situations.
zk-Simon	... modified by anyone who knows a bit of HTML and CSS, and our biggest thing is enterprise level security	12:08
Sparks	zk-Simon: Excellent!	12:09
stickster	Sparks: Actually, having a fedora-wiki ticket system might not be a bad idea if there are going to be things only paritcular people can do	12:10
with the wiki.
Sparks	stickster: Yeah.	12:11
Sparks	zk-Simon: What is the project website for Zikula?	12:11
zk-Simon	Sparks: For Fedora, I think the highlights are the security, our caching system (based on smarty), the fine grained permissions system,	12:12
custom authentication and of course we are modular. The long, 8 year history tells you we're not going to disappear on you, Zikula will be
around for a long time yet.
zk-Simon	Sparks: www.zikula.org - please excuse the slightly disorganised content, we recently refreshed our site and we're still in the process of	12:13
updating the content and navigation to our liking.
Sparks	zk-Simon: No problem. Websites are fluid.	12:13
Sparks	zk-Simon: What are the hardware requirements for Zikula?	12:14
zk-Simon	Sparks: Apache/IIS (recommend Apache to get the best friendly URLs), PHP 5+ (though our 1.x series will work on PHP 4 I can't in good	12:15
conscience recommend using it) and MySQL 4 or 5 (preferably 5)
zk-Simon	Sparks: That's it. Gettext for the upcoming 1.2 version as an extension to PHP	12:15
Sparks	zk-Simon: Excellent.	12:16
Sparks	zk-Simon: Now the fun part. These are feature questions that we had outlined as items that we need or want.	12:17
Sparks	zk-Simon: Does Zikula have a good security record?	12:17
zk-Simon	Sparks: Well, I can't point you to vulnerability stats for Zikula, we've never had a security flaw reported. PostNuke may have some	12:19
relevance, and we've had very few vulnerabilities there as well
Sparks	zk-Simon: Yeah, I think someone brought that to my attention yesterday.	12:19
Sparks	zk-Simon: How proactive is your developer community to fixing issues?	12:20
zk-Simon	Sparks: The code has been reviewed by an automated scanning tool, output compares very favourably with e.g a comparable Joomla release. We	12:20
have an arrangement with a third party who reviews our code, and he's said it's clean though it is constantly under review
Sparks	zk-Simon: Excellent	12:21
zk-Simon	Sparks: Security issues are usually fixed and patched within 48 hours, often 24. If they come to us first through our contact forms then	12:21
we usually fix them before they get near the advisory sites.
Sparks	zk-Simon: Our authentication system (FAS) utilizes a application called json as the interface. Can Zikula use this to authenticate?	12:22
zk-Simon	Sparks: We have what we call Auth Modules, which allow us to authenticate against external sources. This can either take the details	12:24
entered on the site, and send them elsewhere for checking, or alternatively I have previously redirected people to an external page to
authenticate and the result of that is passed back to Zikula.
zk-Simon	Sparks: I've personally implemented a system to authenticate against 'Raven' which is the authentication system used at the University of	12:25
Cambridge here in the UK, and we have an OpenID module too
Sparks	zk-Simon: Okay, I'll put those notes down and I'll let the Infrastructure Team see if they can do that.	12:25
Sparks	zk-Simon: OpenID might work as well.	12:25
Sparks	zk-Simon: How about RSS feeds?	12:26
zk-Simon	Sparks: Providing, or using?	12:26
Sparks	providing, I think	12:27
zk-Simon	Sparks: We have a special theme which outputs RSS headers, and then any module can provide RSS templates for their list output. If a	12:27
module doesn't have it, 20 minutes work adding templates gives you a feed.
Sparks	zk-Simon: Okay, that works.	12:28
Sparks	zk-Simon: We have a translator workforce. How would Zikula handle translations?	12:28
zk-Simon	Sparks: This is the one I wanted to talk about. With 1.2 (in development), our core at least is translated through gettext. That would be	12:31
any strings inside the core, e.g status messages and the like
zk-Simon	Sparks: Content is a bit different. We have on our roadmap a plan to provide a generic way of translating content, however it's not there	12:33
yet. So, translations are dependent on the module you use at the moment. I realise that might not be ideal, but presumably you would be
using one main module for most content, so we could code up a better translations interface for one or two modules if it turns out to be a
problem.
zk-Simon	Sparks: how does your workflow for translations go at the moment?	12:34
Sparks	zk-Simon: Well... There is a mixed answer because it really isn't standardized.	12:35
Sparks	zk-Simon: Currently they are listed along with the other languages.	12:35
Sparks	zk-Simon: I think what we would like is to be able to select the language the person wants to read and those would be the ones they are	12:36
presented to. stickster probably has a better idea, however.
Sparks	zk-Simon: We can probably address this as a group to get ideas, though.	12:37
zk-Simon	Sparks: That is the way the system works at the moment from a user perspective	12:37
Sparks	zk-Simon: Cool. What about output for Transifex?	12:37
zk-Simon	The language is selectable on registration and for unregistered users is stored for the duration of the session	12:37
zk-Simon	Sparks: THis is a system I don't know much about - could you enlighten me a bit?	12:38
Sparks	zk-Simon: Sorry, I can't. I'm not familiar with it, either.	12:39
Sparks	zk-Simon: I'll just leave that one blank for now and we can come back to that later once I get a better explanation.	12:39
Sparks	zk-Simon: Probably a big one is the ability to manage content workflow.	12:40
zk-Simon	Sparks: Ok, well with some more info I'll be able to comment on our ability to support it	12:40
Sparks	zk-Simon: What we would like to do is have writers write, then pass the document for an editor to look over, and then have the editor be able	12:40
to publish.
zk-Simon	Sparks: Our main content modules are workflowed as you describe	12:40
Sparks	zk-Simon: Excellent. Do you ahve an interal version control with rollback capability?	12:41
Sparks	s/interal/internal	12:42
zk-Simon	Sparks: Absolutely, in our most complex module a full revisions hisotry is kept	12:42
Sparks	zk-Simon: How about content expiration. Can you set a date and time for a certain file to expire and be removed from pubic view?	12:43
zk-Simon	Sparks: Yes, pages can have a 'go offline date', certainly	12:44
Sparks	zk-Simon: How about the other way around? Can you have a go live date and time?	12:44
zk-Simon	Sparks: I believe so, though that's a feature I've not used. If not, can be added in a few minutes	12:45
Sparks	zk-Simon: Okay, it wasn't on my list but it just hit me as something that might be useful.	12:45
Sparks	zk-Simon: Going back to the content workflow, can you set multiple roles (writer, editor, etc) to a single user?	12:46
zk-Simon	Sparks: We have a group/permissions system, and any user can be a member of multiple groups. The default would be comment access, allowing	12:47
someone to submit pages for approval, rising to edit/moderate access for editors, and delete access for those who are permitted to delete
things. Full admin access would be restricted to those with a real need to access everything.
Sparks	zk-Simon: Excellent.	12:48
Sparks	zk-Simon: Can you categorize or tag content for organization?	12:48
zk-Simon	Sparks: We have two systems, a site wide cateogries system (not yet supported by all modules, but by quite a few), where any content from	12:49
any module can be categorised in a category tree, or alternatively a tagging system with your standard tag cloud etc.
Sparks	zk-Simon: Excellent. I only have five more quick questions for you.	12:50
Sparks	zk-Simon: How well does your search work?	12:50
zk-Simon	Sparks: Two systems, the old system is database-based and IMO does not work that well. We have a new system from the GSOC to replace it	12:52
based on Zend Search Lucene which is a proper indexer and very nice. Needs some further development but is in a basically working state.
Sparks	zk-Simon: I'm guessing that Zikula was a CMS from the beginning?	12:53
-!- stickster is now known as stickster_food		12:55
* quaid pops his head in		12:55
quaid	woah,that's some buffer to read ...	12:55
quaid	Sparks, zk-Simon : I	12:55
quaid	'll read the buffer, but let me know if there are any standing questions ...	12:55
Sparks	quaid: Maybe you could comment on the tranlation portion of how we want the CMS to work.	12:56
Sparks	quaid: (All of this is going into the wiki.	12:56
zk-Simon	Sparks: Yes, we were orignally a CMS/portal, now we're an application framework and do lots of different things, but we still have very	12:57
strong content management in the background
zk-Simon	quaid: Sorry, I can be a bit verbose at times	12:57
-!- abadger1999 [n=abadger1@65.78.187.8] has quit [Read error: 60 (Operation timed out)]		12:57
Sparks	zk-Simon: Okay. How is the data stored? Is the data protable to another CMS?	12:57
-!- biertie [n=bert@19.159-136-217.adsl-dyn.isp.belgacom.be] has joined #fedora-docs		12:58
zk-Simon	Sparks: It's just in MySQL tables. We'll have, in 2.0 a generic import/export XML framework, but there's no 'export this to x'	12:59
functionality (I don't know of any system with this sort of thing). Data structures are as you'd expect, so with some effort you could
port it all.
Sparks	zk-Simon: That's true. As long as it isn't encrypted in some manner... :)	12:59
zk-Simon	Sparks: As it's just a MySQL database you wouldn't have trouble extracting the data, it's a long way from a proprietary flat file or	13:00
something weird like that. Something I could have mentioned earlier is that we support mutliple databases (e.g. Postgres), however I would
recommend MySQL as that gets the most extensive testing by some distance.
Sparks	zk-Simon: Can Zikula make certain pages or content areas static/non-database driven?	13:01
* quaid almost caught up, 1 more min.		13:01
quaid	ok!	13:03
quaid	working backwards quickly ...	13:03
zk-Simon	Sparks: Not completely, no. The caching system either allows full page or page-element caching. Full page caching will reduce SQL queries	13:03
to 3 or 4, element caching depends on the module. If you were using a particular Short-URL system we could make the pages completely
static without breaking anything
quaid	I think the plan from Fedora Infrastructure is to let the CMS team have a slightly stand-alone area	13:03
quaid	so having e.g. MySQL is fine; it doesn't to be in the main Infra dbase.	13:03
Sparks	quaid: I was told by Infra that MySQL or PostgreSQL was fine.	13:04
quaid	Sparks: I forget if the static stuff is MUST or SHOULD, but we've largely eliminated the need for MUST with proxy caching.	13:04
quaid	Sparks: cool	13:04
Sparks	quaid: It is in the "must" list.	13:04
quaid	zk-Simon: so let me explain the l10n a bit more ...	13:04
quaid	zk-Simon: the deal is, we author in DocBook XML with the source in an SCM (git mainly, some svn)	13:04
quaid	translators grab the POT file via translate.fedoraproject.org (Transifex runs there)	13:05
zk-Simon	Sparks: Depending on your infrastructure, with full page caching on Zikula could handle a lot.	13:05
quaid	and they submit back through the same interface to the SCM.	13:05
quaid	when we build docs, our toolchain uses xml2po to interleave the translated strings from the PO files with the XML	13:05
quaid	and we get translated HTML and PDF	13:05
quaid	so the basic idea with a CMS is to treat those as language-specific blobs	13:06
quaid	we just pull them in and publish them so that Apache can serve the proper one by browser lang setting.	13:06
zk-Simon	quaid: Right, how does this work along with the revisions control etc that you wanted?	13:07
quaid	a Ultimate Grail solution would be a CMS that could use the XML and PO/POT files to build itself, so it could present DocBook built PDFs but	13:07
not have to deal with the same HTML (or something).
Sparks	quaid: Thanks... I didn't remember that.	13:07
quaid	zk-Simon: well, we've always just had it manually	13:07
quaid	http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10/	13:07
quaid	when we do an update, we'll push all that down and mark it as original content (10.0.0) and put the latest at the top (10.0.1 for example.)	13:08
quaid	we don't update this content _that_ often ... maybe once or twice a release.	13:08
quaid	but we could do it more if it were easier; in that case, we'd want it obvious which version was what.	13:08
zk-Simon	quaid: We'd be talking a custom built interface for something like that then, I can't think of any generic frameworks for such a process.	13:09
quaid	zk-Simon: fwiw, we are totally flexible in the what and how; maybe we're not looking at the problem the right way due to having done it the	13:09
hard way for so long :)
quaid	maybe we don't want to expose older versions, for example -- why install buggy software? why use buggy documents?	13:10
quaid	zk-Simon: how does Zikula handle document blogs? I.e., I've got an OO.org document I want to publish in this CMS, etc.	13:11
zk-Simon	It's a difficult one actually, I'd have to have a think.	13:11
quaid	ok	13:11
quaid	it may be that we want to just use the native gettext, if we can figure out what to do with the XML	13:11
zk-Simon	quaid: Depends how you want it to work, we have a standard WYSIWYG editor with the usual copy and paste functions, but there's also a	13:12
module called 'MediaAttach' which allows uploading of e.g. PDFs and provides inline reading/previewing.
quaid	still, we've been looking forward to having downloadable PDFs for a while; people also like tar/zip archives of the HTML.	13:12
quaid	does MediaAttach have a way to associate it with a workflow?	13:13
quaid	that is, can a MediaAttach(ed) item be put in a workflow like a regular chunk of content?	13:13
-!- abadger1999 [n=abadger1@nat/redhat/x-8f64f9c0a0b4d61c] has joined #fedora-docs		13:13
zk-Simon	quaid: Yes, absolutely. Through the WYSIWYG you can click a button, browse through available media and insert a tag - this then pulls in	13:13
the media attach item when displaying the page
zk-Simon	Bad example, but the only one that springs to mind would be: http://www.wolfsonhillel.enfield.sch.uk/index.php - the video and pcitures are	13:15
inserted into the cotent from mediaattach using a visual editor. That was authored by some school teachers after a couple of hours
training.
-!- LinuxCode [n=Titan@fedora/LinuxCode] has joined #fedora-docs		13:16
quaid	so we might be looking at customizing or making a new module to deal with HTML as blobs.	13:18
zk-Simon	quaid: I wouldn't necessarily start completely from scratch, because we already have a module that does >90% of what you need with	13:18
revisions and so on. How we'd integrate the translations system to that would be the key.
quaid	zk-Simon: the main site under fedoraproject.org is going to need a CMS; we're doing a sort-of proving grounds with docs.fedoraproject.org; so	13:19
far it seems clear Zikula could do all that fedoraproject.org needs, it's a much more classic example of a website built with a CMS.
* quaid was just thinking outloud :)		13:19
zk-Simon	I've built websites with complex translation flows before - but sadly it seems there is no holy grail, everyone needs a solution that works	13:20
slightly differently
quaid	aye	13:20
quaid	still, one thing about our need ...	13:20
quaid	Transifex is gaining wider usage and acceptance	13:20
quaid	and our workflow is built from how we translate packages	13:20
quaid	so it's possible that work here will actually be useful to other e.g. open source projects :)	13:20
zk-Simon	quaid: We have been looking at our translations system for a while, so a bit of experience on best-practice will be helpful for sorting it	13:21
out.
quaid	Transifex is mainly an interface in front of N version control systems, which can be hosted anywhere; the SCM admin just adds a 'transif' user	13:21
that has permissions to add/edit PO files and the LINGUAS file.
quaid	so for example, Zikula could extract strings to a POT file and put it in git, then Transifex would handle all the translations, and you'd use	13:22
gettext to build the translated pages with the PO files from git.
quaid	(we could use an SCM at fedorahosted.org so that could be external and specific to the project, to make it a more reusable hack)	13:23
zk-Simon	Your best case workflow? Write in English docbook, commit to SVN, export to HTML/PDF, upload to website? Translators use transiflex to	13:23
translate English, export and this is automatically associated with the English content on the website?
zk-Simon	I'd need to be clear on exactly how it should work before I could think about the solution to the problem :)	13:24
zk-Simon	I'll be back in 5 minutes, apparently I'm wanted	13:25
quaid	zk-Simon: I think you have that best case correct, although I think there is some flexibility in the end points -- the association with a	13:26
source version.
quaid	that is, English isn't always going to be the original language.	13:26
quaid	the automatic association is more with a specific content area (RElease Notes, installation guide, user guide, etc.)	13:26
quaid	i.e., docs.fp.org/release-notes is the container for release notes	13:27
quaid	release-notes/f11 is the container for Fedora 11 released notes	13:27
quaid	within that final container is N language-specific versions of the release notes	13:27
quaid	... and they could get updated with fresh content individually, so we could have an updated english and spanish, with the others having the	13:28
previous version of content.
* quaid has to do some stuff, will check back in a few too		13:28
-!- stickster_food is now known as stickster		13:28
Sparks	quaid: Do you have any other questions?	13:28
Sparks	quaid: I think I'm out.	13:28
zk-Simon	Back. Ok, I'll consider on that and see if I can figure a solution	13:30
Sparks	zk-Simon: Is there a good way we can contact you (email?) that I can put on the wiki?	13:31
zk-Simon	simon@zikula.org is best for Zikula-related stuff. I can drop into IRC whenever if you'd like me to answer questions in real time again.	13:32
Sparks	zk-Simon: That would be great. We have our Docs Project meeting on Wednesdays at 1900 UTC.	13:32
Sparks	zk-Simon: Those meeting are held in #fedora-meeting.	13:32
Sparks	You'll see the post I'm going to make on the listserv.	13:33
zk-Simon	Ok, I'm happy to drop in if you feel it's helpful	13:33
Sparks	zk-Simon: I appreciate you taking time to talk with quaid and I today.	13:33