newcomer
hadaya
My company has asked me to evaluate steer CMS as they are moving to
the symfony framework for their corporate website, hence the reason
for my presence on your mailing list.
First of all, let me congratulate you on the job accomplished so far.
Symfony lacks an appropriate CMS and your plugin fills that gap. Being
a developper myself, I know how difficult it can be to develop a full
solution like this one... especially since, if I'm not mistaken, you
two both have jobs on the side. So I hope that you won't take what
comes next the wrong way. ;o)
...and now a little bit of ranting :o))))
Migrating from version 0.1.0 to 0.2.0 is a major pain... everything
broke down. Actually installing version 0.1.0 wasn't a stroll through
the park either. To be fair the problems I encountered weren't linked
to Steer, but the install notes are so short that it took me a while
to realize that the problem wasn't coming from Steer.
What's up with the random use of short_open_tags ??? I'm testing the
cms on my machine, so modifying the php.ini is feasible. However i'm
not quite sure that i will be the case if and when we'll go into
production with this solution. In any case, if i'm not mistaken, most
web hosters do not give their users access to the php configuration.
And finally, isn't that considered to be bad programming practice ?
Documentation : what documentation ? The current doc doesn't really
allow for a beginner such as myself to start using this cms easily,
and this is a discouraging point : after all isn't the targeted
audience supposed to be non technical ?
Translations on the admin interface : There are a lot of terms
missing, at least on the french version.
In any case, and although i've ranted quite a lot, I still think that
this is a good product. It needs to mature a bit though. Would you
guys accept my contribution for the french translation ? and why not
the creation of mini howto's to help new users move quickly along the
experience curve ?
Keep up the good work,
Chris
Piers Warmers
Thanks for the comments.
> especially since, if I'm not mistaken, you
> two both have jobs on the side. So I hope that you won't take what
> comes next the wrong way. ;o)
Yep, this is a little project we've been doing in our spare time.
> Migrating from version 0.1.0 to 0.2.0 is a major pain... everything
> broke down.
A fair call, and one which we are aiming at fixing. The first step we
are implementing to fix the issue of upgrade is migrations. The 0.2.0
release now includes the sfPropelMigrationsLightPlugin to help
maintain a structured update system for the database. There's a huge
change between these two releases, but you should find a much more
stable and linear release cycle for the future releases.
> What's up with the random use of short_open_tags ??? I'm testing the
> cms on my machine, so modifying the php.ini is feasible. However i'm
> not quite sure that i will be the case if and when we'll go into....
There were a few of the short tags which slipped through in the search
plugin. I've corrected them and that change is now in trunk and and
the sandbox package. Let me know if you find any others, but a search
over the project locally hasn't returned any more for me.
> Documentation : what documentation ? The current doc doesn't really
> allow for a beginner such as myself to start using this cms easily,
> and this is a discouraging point : after all isn't the targeted
> audience supposed to be non technical ?
Absolutely, we've put together some time in the next week to focus on
documentation on a technical and end-user level.
> Would you
> guys accept my contribution for the french translation ?
Absolutely, if you can send any translations through, we will include
them in the project. Thanks :)
> and why not
> the creation of mini howto's to help new users move quickly along the
> experience curve ?
Sounds good. I've also been working on a set of screencasts.
Hopefully these will be useful.
> Keep up the good work,
Thanks for the comments.
We're already well along the way for some big improvements, hopefully
they will be available shortly.
We will keep you up-to-date.
Thanks,
Piers