ezPlatform, formerly ezPublish is a content management solution from eZ Systems. The vendor says their solution provides organizations with the technology and framework to build a suite of digital experiences including news and media sites, brand sites, multichannel apps and the Internet of Things, intranets and web portals. This solution is multichannel, multilingual and multisite ready.
ezPlatform features user defined content and classes, version control, templates, workflow…
N/A
WebWave
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
WebWave — an alternative for agencies and freelancers for creating custom websites for clients with the support of CMS. Using CMS with no sacrifices WebWave is a CMS platform that gives a designer precision up to 1 px in every single detail just like in more sophisticated graphic programs such as Photoshop while remaining a drag and drop software. This is to make creating websites much faster without loosing on details. Spend less time talking WebWave…
For a new site: 1. Are there any hosting requirements? eZ Publish works best on a traditional LAMP stack. 2. What is the expertise of the development and systems administrations individuals? There should be some PHP development experience and a solid level of Apache and MySQL hosting. 3. Who will be managing the content of the site? What is their bandwidth for training? For ongoing content changes?
Well suited: Small businesses and entrepreneurs: WebWave is an excellent option for small businesses and entrepreneurs who need a professional-looking website without spending a lot of time and money. It's easy to use, customizable, and offers fast load times and responsive design. Less appropriate: Large e-commerce websites: If you're looking to create a large e-commerce website with a vast number of products and advanced features, WebWave may not be the best option. Its e-commerce functionality is limited compared to other website builders, and it may not be able to accommodate the needs of a large-scale online store. Also, if you need much coding, you would rather have it with something that is wordpress-based.
Content Taxonomy: Content is managed in a tree. Though taxonomy vs folksonomy is a near-religious debate among professionals, clients seeing the system for the first time just seem to "get it" more often.
Content Flexibility: Common content types such as blog posts and articles are available out of the box. However, customizing these and creating new content types is very easy.
Developer Friendly: Developers need only a little PHP experience to get started. Of course being an expert doesn't hurt and opens the door for the development of custom modules.
WebWave's site builder is the platform's truly innovative feature. I've never come across another service that deploys a layer-based approach in web design, as most of them usually deploy a grid-based system. This is an incredible alteration that ensures WebWave behaves much like a traditional graphic design tool, thereby resulting in an experience that is a lot more intuitive and instinctive. I believe this has the potential to radically change the way people approach no-code web design.
WebWave provides automatic, daily backups and a free SSL certificate for every website. This results in excellent security.
WebWave's support team is first-class! I had some teething-issues in the beginning, but the support team quickly got me back on track.
WebWave's community/forum is an excellent place to vote and request new features. This proves the development team is committed to making WebWave better by listening to their users.
The template language: Outputting content or doing something special with it requires use of the templating language. Myself along with other developers I have trained, found this to be one of the biggest hurdles.
Layout of physical files: The system decides what settings files and templates to use based on a hierarchy of modules. The same file can exist in multiple modules and you can find yourself deep within very similar looking folder structures, causing confusion during debugging.
Community: eZ has a solid set of community contributors but the gap between it and Drupal or Wordpress is pretty large.
Some scope for improvement in UX (colors are not very appealing). It is simple to use but design is a little dated. Especially in the builder section, I'd like to see modern design for buttons and maybe gradients also: as this is where visual motivation is also important
Some edits take effect only after pressing OK. That should be eliminated as it's an unnecessary addition. It's also kind of annoying to do that again and again, which can add up to a lot as we do so many small tweaks while building the website.
Few things (maybe glitches) in design. The rectangle below the footer was uneditable for me. I spent quite some time trying to figure it out so I'm convinced it's a glitch.
1. The support person does not seem to understand the issues, and seems like they go off to talk to somebody and revert back every 5 to 10 minutes. It takes up a lot of time. 2. There is a lack of reading material to address simple issues like changing the website name in the dashboard, pasting a code, etc.
eZ Publish isn't as large in community size and number of installations as other content management systems. However, it's just as capable and met our needs:
Developers, system administrators, and project manager can all speak the same language during the development and maintenance cycles of a site.
End-user training is very straight-forward.
Vendor support is available.
Client IT departments can access if need (developers/designers/sysadmins).
The community is there (forums) and there are solid contributions (extensions) from both the vendor and the community.
WordPress is a more flexible and adaptive content management system than Webwave. In addition to the functionalities that are already built-in, I am unable to add any customizable plugins or add-ons. However, in the majority of cases, the inherent features of Webwave are sufficient for developing a website that serves its intended purpose. Webwave also makes it possible for you to add animations and the appearance of each of your design elements, whereas WordPress builders require additional plugins in order for users to access most of such capabilities. Webwave has several essential design features available internally, thus saving money and time.
Common knowledge: By making eZ a core offering, developers, system administrators, and project managers were able to communicate with each other effectively.
Training: Due to its content taxonomy, end-user training often went well.
Support: In our case, we had Gold support from eZ Publish which saved time and helped with customizations.
