Yesterday I was pleased to receive an email from the eZ Partner Team informing us we had reached Gold Partner status which is a great achievement for our team and something we couldn’t have achieved without the dedication and passion of our staff.

Over the coming 6 months we look forward to actively pursuing new eZ Publish opportunities, providing improved and comprehensive training materials for the greater eZ community, releasing some of our developments back to the community and persuing that Platinum partner status.

In my work and travel I have found an increasing need for VPN access to remote networks, including our offices, datacentres and client sites. In most cases these are over Cisco VPN which simplifies the process and makes it a breeze to connect new users.

Over the past while I have been trying out some other VPN products including the open source OpenVPN system for remote network access. Unfortunately the Cisco VPN client does not play with OpenVPN which requires another 3rd party application.

Until recently I have been using Tunnelblick, a small application built for OpenVPN connections which has great support for Tiger but many niggly bugs in Leopard. Recently I saw an article reviewing a new application called Viscosity, an OpenVPN Client for Leopard.

All I can say is wow. Viscosity whilst still in beta is an easy-to-use VPN client with automatic import for existing Tunnelblick connections. It connects to growl to provide notifications of VPN connection and disconnection and lives away at the top of my screen in silence when I don’t need it.

If you are working on Leopard and looking for an easy to use VPN solution I recommend looking into OpenVPN with Viscosity as your client-side application. Download a free beta copy from their site and give it whirl.

By default in new installations of eZ Publish using the ezwebin or similar packages you will have access to the blog, blog post and comment content classes – there are everything you need to get started with your own blog on eZ Publish.

As I built out this site one of the things I noticed with the blog_post.tpl was that comments were being displayed newest first, in the same manner they are on the eZ Publish website, this seems a little counter-intuitive to me and certainly breaks the design pattern established by most other blogging tools available.

To flip the order of your comments to chronological order, oldest first you can approach this in two different ways. You can modify the fetch that pulls back the comments and sort_by the published date, which is what happens by default, you just need to change the ascending/descending option.

The alternative is to accept the default fetch if that is beyond your knowledge and modify the template using the reverse operator to flip the resulting array from your fetch.

I have posted an example below of how this could be done.

{foreach $comments|reverse() as $comment}
{node_view_gui view='line' content_node=$comment}
{/foreach}

I haven’t had a chance yet to run performance tests on each implementation although I believe that the modified fetch function will be faster than array reverse within template code. Over the coming weeks I will have a chance to confirm this.

We are moving ahead at Quiqcorp and have a number of positions available for development and sales staff looking for an exciting and challenging position working with eZ Publish and similar web technologies.

If you have a passion for web technologies, eZ Publish or like solving complex problems then I definitely want to have a chat with you. If instead you happen to be someone who likes wearing suits, cold calling leads and closing big ticket sales turns you on then we should chat further.

Work from our offices, telecommute or suggest another solution – I am open to good ideas.

Big thanks go out to Nicolas Pastorino for mentioning to me the other day he had registered here on the blog and was unable to post comments.

I have since resolved this permissions issue so commenting should be allowed for both anonymous and registered users. It does however make me stop and think about new ways in which I can test and build out deployment guidelines that cover issues like this.

In any normal development process you have clients testing and revising your work, which of course didn’t happen in this case until Nicolas mentioned it to me. Any suggestions as to how you handle the large number of tasks required for an eZ Publish deployment?

Update: Well it seems it didn’t take long for comment spam to show up. I will lock down comments to registered users only until I put other measures in place to look after comment spam.