eZ Publish

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

eZ Publish
Developed by	eZ Systems
Latest release	4.0 / November 29, 2007
OS	Cross-platform
Platform	PHP
Genre	Content management system
License	GNU General Public License
Website	http://ez.no/

Free software Portal

eZ Publish (pronounced "easy publish") is an open source enterprise content management system developed by the Norwegian company eZ Systems. eZ Publish is available for free download under the GPL licence, as well as under proprietary licences with commercial support.^[1]

1 Areas of use
2 Handling
3 Business model
4 Functional range
5 Technology
6 eZ Components
7 Criticism
8 External links
9 References
10 See also

[edit] Areas of use

eZ Publish supports the development of professional, customized web applications. Typical applications range from a personal homepage to a multilingual corporate website including role-based multi-user access, e-commerce functions and online communities.^[2]

According to eZ Systems, eZ Publish is used for tens of thousands of web applications of varying type and size worldwide, among them MIT (specifically the controller's office),^[3] Vogue magazine, NASA, the US Navy DASN and the Swiss public broadcasting organisation Schweizer Fernsehen.^[4] Further examples eZ Publish-based projects are listed on the eZ Publish reference page.^[5]

[edit] Handling

eZ Publish is managed via a Web browser, thus additional local software is not necessary. It also features a rich text editor that allows formatting content similar to a word processor (e.g. Word). This enables content editing and contribution without HTML skills. Content management can also be done through the eZ Publish frontend.

[edit] Business model

By providing the software for free, eZ Systems follows an approach called "best of both worlds".^[6] eZ Publish may be used and modified according to the GPL. In addition, paid professional support is available, which includes an automatic maintenance service (eZ Network) and a bugfix guarantee. Furthermore, a "Professional Licence" is available,^[7] granting the right to use eZ Publish under licence conditions different from the GPL. With this model, eZ Systems strives to combine the advantages of commercial and free software. The company has received several awards for this business model, including the "Norwegian Prize for promoting Free Software"^[8] and was named by EContent as one of the 100 most influential companies in the IT industry.^[9]

eZ Systems has a network of certified partner companies that perform application implementations. Currently there are approximately 200 partners worldwide.^[10] The company employs about 80 people in Norway, Ukraine, France, Canada and Germany.^[11] Its community includes tens of thousands of programmers, designers and professional users ^[12].

[edit] Functional range

The eZ Publish functional range targets the quick, professional and secure realization of web applications. Functional criteria are (besides standards such as sitemaps, search and printing function):

a logic for content versioning;
a media library; and
role-based rights management.

Furthermore, custom changes can be made to eZ Publish. For this, the system's architecture provides "Extensions", which are meant to contain individual functions. This allows for the upgrading of the kernel even after customizing new versions. Finally, there are several hundred contributions provided by the community. eZ Systems integrates such contributions into the kernel on a continuous basis. This is done especially to avoid mixed installations of the kernel and custom plugins, which could lead to serious problems (e.g. for migrating an existing installation to new versions of PHP, as such plugins are usually supported unpredictably).

[edit] Technology

eZ Publish is written in PHP. The recommended web server is Apache.

The database abstraction layer enables the use of nearly any common database by using drivers, thus rendering changes to the core system unnecessary. MySQL is recommended^[13], but drivers for PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server ^[14] and Oracle ^[15]are also available.

eZ Publish is cluster-ready and enforces the separation of content and presentation via XML storage of all content.

[edit] eZ Components

Future versions of eZ Publish will be based on eZ Components.^[16] eZ Components is a library of standardized modules for speeding up application development. It includes functions for compressing binary files, optimizing performance through caching, connecting to several databases, debugging, RSS, generating graphs for analysis, converting images, supporting email and validating user input.^[17]

eZ Components are conceptualized as an alternative for the PEAR project. They are published under the BSD licence. Nevertheless, commercial support is available from eZ Systems. In addition, eZ Systems is developing "eZ Platform", which will be a development environment for PHP 6.^[18]