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 content classes


Every type of content in eZ Publish has its own content class, but we have to clearly understand that a content class doesn't store any type of data; it represents a definition of a data structure.

For example, if our site shows some stories on the home page, these stories should be defined by an Article content class that is built on one or more attributes, such as Title, Body, and Publication date.

These attributes are called Class Attributes. As we can see in the following image from the eZ Publish documentation, these attributes are represented by a specific datatype (which is the smallest entity of storage) and describe how a specific content has to be retrieved, validated, and saved:

Class attributes

The class attributes are defined by four elements:

  • The name

  • The generic control

  • The internal identifier

  • The datatype-specific controls

The name is the friend name used to store the class attribute and it will be used, for example, in the administration panel...