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

eZ Publish packages


As we have said in the preface, it is very important to understand that eZ Publish offers (as downloaded) three main features:

  • It comes with a number of ready-to-use website packages

  • It has lots of hardcoded, solid, and useful functionality

  • It is flexible—behavior and components can be extended or overwritten

Website packages are designed by the eZ System to use the main engine to help users deploy different sites with different scopes: a community site, a static one, or an intranet application. The three main packages are Plain Site, eZ Webin, and eZ Flow.

Whereas the first one is only a skeleton, on top of which a developer can craft his or her own application, the other two allow developers to use a lot of functionality without touching an IDE.

eZ Webin—the out of the box CMS

eZ Webin is a package that contains all of the functionality required to build a complete Web 2.0 site. It is fully documented by eZ System, and this documentation can be found at http://ez.no/doc/extensions/website_interface. eZ Webin is very useful for creating a site from scratch.

To build our site, we will use this package in the next chapters, customizing the site wherever needed.

eZ Webin includes:

  • Tag clouds

  • Blogs

  • Forums

  • Events management

  • Calendars

eZ Flow—web publishing for news and media portals

Vibrant sites are all about content flow—getting the most engaging and timely content streams onto the site's critical portal pages. Built on top of eZ Publish as a result of collaboration and experience with media customers, the eZ Flow extension (http://ez.no/doc/extensions/ez_flow) enables editors to build complex page layouts and pre-plan the publication schedule to ensure a constant flow of rich content. In short, eZ Flow brings modern portal management possibilities to eZ Publish.

eZ Flow is a web package that provides the following added functionalities:

  • Layouts based on zones and blocks

  • Custom layouts

  • The ability to fetch content from different sources

  • The ability to search, order, hide, and push content

  • Scheduling of content flow

  • Multiple block-specific templates

  • Previews of portal pages

  • An intuitive Flash player

  • Embedded video advertisement

  • Live video streaming and recording

  • Ranking and related media

  • Native integrations with ad servers

  • Connectors for web analytics