Had an interesting evening with the great guys from Image Lab and the local Christchurch design community to celebrate the latest photographic works from Grahame Sydney’s Antarctic expeditions.

It was a good function, great food and drinks, some amazing photos of the barren antarctic landscape and an inspiring talk from Grahame.

New Book from Packt Publishing

I was recently approached by Divya from Packt Publishing to review a new book recently authored by Martin Bauer of DesignIT, a local eZ Publish partner in Australia. The book is entitled, Managing eZ Publish Web Content Management Projects.

I certainly look forward to reviewing this book over the coming weeks and believe, based on the information I have already received, that it should contain a wealth of information we should all be applying to our larger eZ Publish projects.

For those interested you can read more and order the book online at Packt Publishing.

Came across an interesting issue with cache-blocks the other day when trying to add in audioscrobbling on the block and playing with some other templates.

Have lodged an official bug report with eZ at http://issues.ez.no/11829

Has anyone else experienced this problem as yet?

I have a number of projects on at the moment which involve managing media types and providing editing facilities for the managed assets. Whilst the built-in image management tools in eZ are great for resizing images and the like, they don’t provide for dynamically allowing the users to crop images to preset sizes or the like.

I have surveyed the scene in regards to image management available through PHP/JS and found the Javascript Image Cropper UI by David Spurr. This cool little utility is built on the Prototype and script.aculo.us libraries and has an array of functions for cropping images. The utility itself does not perform the cropping or image management on the server side, but allows the user to interactively choose what they would like done, with the coordinates and related variables being available for passing into whatever script you decide to integrate.

I am going to look at developing a new datatype for eZ over the coming day or two utilising this utility to provide cropping functionality and the ability to create versions/derivative images from the original upload.

As more information becomes available I will let you know and will likely release the results as a contribution to the eZ community.

When working through some changes on this site the other day I noticed the initial permissions shipping with eZ 3.9.3 and above are incorrect for providing comment access to blog posts.

There is a missing class entry in the members policies to allow commenting on the Blog Post class. See below:

	Class( Comment ) , Section( Standard ) , ParentClass( Article , Article (main-page) , Blog )

To enable Members to post comments on your blog, you will need to add a new create permission for the Blog Post class (or modify the existing one).

	Class( Comment ) , Section( Standard ) , ParentClass( Article , Article (main-page) , Blog post )

This appears to be an issue from 3.9.3 through to 3.10. I haven’t checked 4.0 as yet.