Book Image

eZ Publish 4: Enterprise Web Sites Step-by-Step

Book Image

eZ Publish 4: Enterprise Web Sites Step-by-Step

Overview of this book

eZ Publish provides developers with a structure to build highly impressive applications and then quickly deploy them into a live environment. eZ Publish is complex, with a steep learning curve, but with the right direction it offers great flexibility and power. What makes eZ Publish special is not the long list of features, but what's going on behind the scenes. Created specifically for newcomers to eZ Publish, and using an example Magazine web site, this book focuses on designing, building and deploying eZ Publish to create an enterprise site quickly and easily. This tutorial takes eZ Publish's steep learning curve head-on, and walks you through the process of designing and building content-rich web sites. It makes the unrivalled power and flexibility of eZ Publish accessible to all developers. The book is organized around technical topics, which are handled in depth, with a general progression that follows the learning experience of the reader, and features a single magazine web site project from installation to completion and deployment. This hands-on guide helps the reader to understand the Content Management System to create a web 2.0-ready web site by creating new extensions or overriding the existing ones. In turn, it helps you to become confident when working in the eZ Publish administration area and offers an environment in which you can practice while working through the chapters.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
eZ Publish 4: Enterprise Web Sites Step-by-Step
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface
Advance Debugging

What is eZ Publish?


eZ Publish is an Enterprise Content Management System. It helps to build corporate websites, intranets, web shops, and media portals. Moreover, eZ Publish is 100% open source, available either as a free download or as an enterprise solution—eZ Publish Premium—with support, guarantees, and maintenance.

This software is designed to be used by small, medium, and large companies. It provides a lot of advanced features that can be used, by default, to create professional and secure solutions.

The software allows websites to be fully extended and modified, and unlike other CMSes, it's a truly scalable system.

eZ Publish supports, out of the box, the following features:

  • The management of users' roles

  • The ability to assign roles and policies to different content categories or types

  • Definition of workflow tasks for collaborative creation, often coupled with integrated event messaging

  • The ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content

  • The ability to import content from other sources (that is, an OpenOffice document)

eZ Publish is more than a simple CMS; it is a Content Management Framework (CMF). This means that it is much more flexible, extendable, and reusable.

What is a CMF?

A content management framework is an Application Programming Interface (API) for creating a customized content management system.

The eZ Publish kernel is crafted on top of eZ CMF, a content management framework fully developed by eZ System. This framework makes the eZ Publish functionality stable, secure, and well engineered. And thanks to the CMF, it is possible to extend and personalize the CMS features to provide specific tasks or create mashups and integrations with other open source products, such as CRMs, financial software, or e-commerce platforms.

The most recent releases of eZ Publish also use eZ Components, a set of independent components that will eventually replace all of the core functionality of eZ CMF. With eZ Publish 4.0, it is possible to develop extensions using these components that give a powerful API for each use.