rants

Hello world! After some (very good) time offline I’m back with good news.  As you can see from the big ‘beta’ on the  head of these pages, the site has been added an important feature. It is now possible to add content in languages that is not English and manage translations.  At the moment the languages enabled are Spanish (Castillan), German, Italian and English.  More can be added on request.

Most of the work to modify the standard eZ Publish features was done by Alejandro Serrano, who we can’t thank enough.  He didn’t know eZ Publish before but it took him very little time to master it. 

Would you like to help developing this site?  Get in touch with Fellowship-hackers at fsfeurope dot org.  For comments, bug reports and suggestions use the forum.

I and Georg have spent most of the day upgrading the server that runs fsfe.org.  The Fellowship needed to upgrade eZ Publish to use the better language management of new version, but to do so we needed to install also php4.4, that is not available for sarge. After testing on a test machine we decided to go on the real one this morning.  The server seems to be doing well for now, there are only some minor glitches still to solve. 

As for eZ, I and Alejandro will be working on setting up the new language stuff in the next days. If you want to join hacking on eZ Publish let us know.

A new fellow asked on the forum why we picked eZ Publish. I have answered there, but I think it’s better to repeat it also here for all the Planet readers.

FSFE chose eZ Publish because we needed a system that was not only flexible and easy to deploy but that was fully supported.  We ran tests with other CMS, but none convinced us fully until we were offered by eZ Systems not only the software eZ Publish but also one of their programmer to assist us in all customizations.  eZ Systems also added on top of that a support contract.  So, the software fit our needs, eZ Publish is Free Software released under the GNU GPL and we had a developer available for customization plus a support contract.  It was the best offer we received .

As a good side effect, since FSFE and eZ Systems started this collaboration, eZ released almost all of their software under the GNU GPL, and we are very happy about this.  Some of their software is still under non-free licenses and we are not so happy.  But the cooperation proved to be good for Free Software and we will keep helping them do the right thing and become a fully free business.

Let me add that paying for free software is not a sin, but until today FSFE didn’t pay a dime.  We will probably decide to invest into the development of the portal during 2007 to add the collaboration features we need for the Advocacy groups that are starting to form. But we haven’t taken any decision yet.