A programmer's tale

eZ projects – status

February 17th, 2007

I’d like to give you a short overview of what is planned for the new projects section of ez.no, which will replace the current contributions section and the pubsvn community Subversion repository.

Project registration – After publishing a project, a workflow event will setup the project structure based upon a skeleton. The skeleton is in fact an existing subtree on your site. This makes the workflow event very flexible. All descendants of the skeleton root node will be copied under the new project. The workflow also automatically assigns roles to specific user group nodes copied from the skeleton. These role assignments are limited to the project subtree. The workflow will also add the project creator to a specific user group node copied from the skeleton.

Project source code repository – Another workflow event will make a private Subversion repository for the project, either on the same host the eZ publish site is running on or on another host trough SSH. Authentication to the Subversion repositories is controlled with an Apache htpasswd file. A cronjob will regularly recreate the htpasswd file based on the account data in the eZ publish users table, so new users are added and passwords are synchronized. Another cronjob will regularly recreate an authz SVN access file, which is used to control the access rights (read / write) to the different Subversion repositories. If you place the Subversion repositories on another host, then the htpasswd and authz SVN access files need to be moved to this host with a utily like rsync.

Project membership – Users can request to become member of a specific project user group. The membership extension will accomplish this. In a next phase sending out invitations by e-mail will be implemented.

The PHP coding has finished. Now it’s just a matter of modifying templates, testing and setting it all up on projects.ez.no …

Entry Filed under: eZ Publish