eZ publish Oriented Designer: Why programmers don’t need Windows at work

It has been almost one month that I'm in Norway and the interesting part is that I'm using Ubuntu all the time at work, and only using Windows at home, how it is possible here and wasn't in Brazil? The key is the designer role here. In this blog post I'll talk about that.

Before I needed to create all the xhtml and css stuff, the designer was just responsible for the psd file, so I needed to slice the psd file, create the xhtml and css, verify cross browser compatibility then develop in eZ publish. Obviously, several times the designer simple didn't know anything about CMS and, of course, nothing about eZ publish, and there were problems.

Why? Simple, I needed to spent a lot of time just asking questions like where's the user menu? Where's search form? The most funny event was when I received a layout that was supposed to be created in Flash, you know, fixed content area height and width, fancy scrollbars, nice user login screen, very nice. So the problems started, where it will appears all the errors messages? How this and that will be displayed. So, many times I found myself doing also designer stuff, and yes it was very time consuming, and yes I needed to use Windows at work 'cause of cross browser checking. There weren't any standard, and I would be happy if I received I nice psd file, I mean, all layers organized in folders and in the right width, believe me, one time I received a converted Corel Draw file to Photoshop with thousands of non sense layers.

Now things are different here, I received just the xhtml+css+images, and the best part is that I receive it already organized in folders following the exactly design structure and there's almost no surprises when passing the xhtml to pagelayout.tpl. And the best part is that most of projects are standardized, so, no long discussions about where's it where's that, and, consequently, there's no need to check cross browser compatibility, 'cause it just works, so I can just focus on features, so I use Ubuntu at work. I don't believe the designer here has much more work than the ones in Brazil, but I do believe the one here just work smartly and knows eZ publish / xhtml + css, and it makes a big difference, to tell the truth, the entire process is interestingly done, and it makes possible to deliver a "stable prototype" in less than one week, just impossible in Brazil, and I tried to explain the problem there several times.

So here's my advise: if you owns a company working with any CMS, you and your designer needs to know at least how the used CMS works, and your designer needs a plus, needs to understand how layouts are created in that CMS and, of course, deliver organized xhtml+css, and this is the minimum, you also need some standards as well.

Thankfully I'm newbie eZ publish developer compared to the owners, the designer is also one of the owners, of the company I work right now, and I can use Ubuntu at work, now I feel like I'll become a PROgrammer =)