eZ Publish
EZ Publish is an open source enterprise content management system. It is developed by the Norwegian company eZ Systems, along with a growing user and developer community. eZ Publish is both available for free download under the GPL as well as under proprietary licenses with appropriate commercial support and aims at the development of professional web applications with PHP.
The name of eZ Publish is a pun on the English easy and is like the English very easy publish.
Areas of application
EZ Publish allows the development of professional, customized web applications. Typical applications range from a personal homepage on the classic multi-lingual corporate presence with role-based multi-user access - on the intranet - and e- commerce functionality, then for magazines, newspapers, magazines to online communities.
EZ Publish is used according to the manufacturer worldwide for more than 170,000 web applications of all types and sizes, including MIT, Vogue magazine, NASA, the U.S. Navy, Sat1 and the Swiss television.
Operation
EZ Publish is controlled via a web browser, local additional software is required. A rich text editor that can be formatted in the content, such as in a word processor (eg Word), also allows users without any knowledge of HTML, editorial contributions. Alternatively can be used directly for editing the website ( the frontend, ie the visible to the visitors of the page ). Another option is to edit with OpenOffice.org and WebDAV. The documents are simply pushed to the Explorer, Konqueror or Finder into the desired folder and then automatically published. Similarly, an existing object is edited.
Manufacturer / business model
The manufacturer eZ Systems tracked with the free release of the software an approach, which the company called a "best of both worlds". eZ Publish can be used and modified free of charge under the GPL. For a fee professional support is also available. So eZ Systems offers the eZ Network a manufacturer's warranty combined with a maintenance contract. In addition, a Professional license to buy, which entitled to use eZ Publish under other licenses than the GPL, which allow changes to the source code, without requiring them to be re-released under GPL. eZ Systems thus trying to combine the advantages of commercial and free software. The company has won several awards for this business model, including the CM Forum 2006 Web Idol Award, the Norwegian Prize for promo ting Free Software as well as one of the 100 most influential companies in the IT industry.
EZ Systems services and certified partner companies, which take over the concrete implementation in the customer order. Currently, there are about 230 international partners, including 26 in Germany. The company itself has about 80 employees in Norway, Denmark, Belgium, France, Canada and Germany. The developer community covers, according eZ Systems tens of thousands of programmers.
Functions
The range of functions aimed at fast, professional and reliable implementation of web applications. In addition to CMS standard features such as site maps, search and print view there are the following additional functional features:
- Logic for versioning
- Media Library
- Role -based rights management using Access Control Lists.
It is also possible to make custom changes to eZ Publish. The system architecture provides this before so-called extensions, in which individual functionality is deposited. This allows the kernel even after customizing the system to upgrade to new versions. Finally, the part of the open source community, there are around 800 released under the GPL extensions.
EZ Systems adopts the approach of continuous extensions to integrate the community into the kernel. This is intended to prevent mixed installations of kernel and individual develop plug-ins, then the example would be limited to new versions of PHP in terms of the ability to migrate because the plugins are supported and developed to varying degrees.
Technology
As an Apache web server is recommended by the manufacturer. This software is independent of the operating system and can be used on both Windows, Apple Mac OS X, as well as under various Unix variants.
It is possible to practically use all available databases. This is done by programming a driver without any changes need to be made to the kernel. In addition to the recommended eZ Systems MySQL database driver for PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle are available. Due to the support of open standards such as XML and SOAP eZ Publish can also be flexibly integrated into existing IT infrastructures.
EZ Publish is cluster-aware and forces through the XML -compliant storage of all contents of the strict separation of information and design ( media -independent data management ), which barrier-free design, for example, easier for Braille devices and the integration of other output devices such as WAP browser or mobile phones.
In spring 2012 eZ Systems announced the new version 5. This is based on Symfony2, the first release was published in November 2012. Thus the old features of earlier versions still continue to function, eZ Publish provides the legacy mode. Thus templates can be used by < = 4.x, new templates are, however, written with Twig.
EZ Components
Since the summer of 2007, an open-source library of independent modules is offered with eZ Components on the basis since then eZ Publish builds. In December 2009, appeared with 2009.2 the ninth version of the package.
It is a library of standard modules, which should accelerate the application development. Among other things, there are functions for compressing, to optimize performance by caching, to support various databases, debugging, RSS feeds, to generate graphs for analysis and conversion of image files, to support e- mail, document conversion, for search and validation of user input. In total (as of July 2012) offered 46 modules.
The eZ Components represent a component -based framework, whose elements are independent of each other and can be used in combination with the libraries of other providers. For you to make an alternative about the PEAR project.
The modules are released under the BSD license and can be further developed and sold. Furthermore, commercial support of eZ Systems is available. eZ Systems is also developing at the eZ platform, which is based on the eZ Components and will offer a web development environment based on PHP 6.