February 2006 Archives
I have been playing a little bit more with eZ Publish for the BryteNet site. One little disappointment was that I could not generate friendly URIs like http://brytenet.com/forum/, but I have to work with URIs as http://brytenet.com/index.php?/forum/. According to the eZ people this is because BryteNet has set up PHP as a CGI process and not through Apache's mod_php, which understands the accept_path_info function. The Brytenet servers implemented PHP as a CGI process for security reasons, and there is no way to change this in an easy way. I still don't understand why this is such a problem, as other PHP applications such as WordPress are able to produce friendly URIs.
Anyway, maintaining a site's content with eZ Publish is very easy. I have been able to set up the whole content structure in no-time, and even made some changes to the default templates. Templating is more daunting, as the template language used is very, very complete. For the moment I have only made some small changes, and have concentrated myself on the actual contents of the site. Today I also created a Dutch version of the BryteNet site, which was done within 5 minutes! Now I am translating all content, which is done in a very clever way. A single object (text, folder, image,...) can have several translations, and depending on the way you access this object, one version or the other is shown. So going to http://brytenet.com gives me the default (English) view of the home page, while http://nl.brytenet.com will show me the Dutch view of the same object. Very neat! I still have to translate the FAQ section, which for the moment will show the default language, even if I request the Dutch view.
When all has been translated into Dutch, I will add Spanish and Catalan too. And probably about the same time I will start tweaking my templates to change the components shown and the layout of the pages. The nicest job, making a unique design for this site, I will keep for the last, as it is the most logical order, and to have something to work to.
The last weeks I have been very busy with the new BryteNet site. The old site had been created in a couple of minutes 'just to have something', and never changed afterwards. It was really time for a complete site overhaul. When planning the datacenter move, I decided not to restore the old site, but to put a simple page with the main properties of the hosting packages and contact information instead. That gave me the chance to built the new site properly.
I have to identify myself in order to get Internet access?! How on earth do they think to stop terrorism by asking for identification for terminal access, while I can have a wireless connection without identifying myself?
