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

Chapter 3. Defining and Creating Content Classes

To make a table we need some wood

to make some wood we need a tree

to make a tree we need a seed ...

"Ci vuole un fiore", a children's song by Gianni Rodari

In this chapter, we will look at what the content class is for eZ Publish, and how to create and manage it. We will define all of the content classes needed by our site to create articles and staff profile pages.

Before opening a browser and starting to create new content classes, we have to take a few minutes to learn what a content class is, how eZ Publish manages the content, and how this content will help us in our work. We also need to decide what we will want to publish on the site by defining all of the appropriate content classes.

Managing the content

One of the main scopes of a CMS is to manage any kind of content and data structure with as little effort for the users as possible. So it is very important to handle the content with enough flexibility to allow choosing what to show and...