eZ Publish review based on experience with an Alexa Top 250 site
July 08, 2015
eZ Publish review based on experience with an Alexa Top 250 site
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
4.x
Modules Used
- Content Scheduling, Edge Side Includes
Overall Satisfaction with eZ Publish Platform
eZ Publish can easily satisfy the needs of customers who want a classic "brochureware" site. However, it can satisfy the other end of the spectrum when clients:
- Need to allow their internal IT department access to the site and its hosting
- Have dozens of active content editors and need to schedule publishing
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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